"The Germans Squealed . . ."

As troops of the victorious Red armies rushed on toward the frontiers of East Prussia, German language primers were issued to them.

East Prussia, bloodied by history, was a fitting arena for the first real battles on German soil in World War II. But it did not seem so to the Germans in East Prussia. They, according to reports in Stockholm, exhibited "the highest state of alarm." At Koenigsberg the Nazis were said to be dismantling the port installations. The wife of Gauleiter Erich Koch departed for the German interior with three truckloads of furniture.

Less indulgent to other civilians, the Nazi authorities forbade them to enter or leave the province without permits, put some to work on fortifications. Nevertheless, refugees--some of whom streamed in from the Baltic countries--crowded railway stations and blocked roads to the west, not bothering with identification papers or ration cards.

The Nazi radio appealed to Germans of the Ostraum (eastern areas) to stand firm: "Do not allow yourselves to be shaken by anything. Think of the past which has proved so well that you can rely on Hitler."

With the Fuehrer so far away, German troops in the path of the Russians relied on materials closer to hand. In a feverish hurry they laid extensive minefields, felled trees, dynamited huge craters in the roads, blew up bridges and rail trackage, destroyed any of their own transport which they could not fuel or repair.

First to the Sea? In front of East Prussia and of Warsaw to the south, the Germans had four main bastions: Kaunas and Grodno on the Niemen River, Bialystok and Brest-Litovsk. Brilliant young General Ivan Chernyakovsky reached the Niemen on a 75-mile front, forced several crossings, established bridgeheads on the west bank, attacked Grodno. Early this week his army was joined there by that of General Georg Zakharov, and Grodno fell.

A flanking movement northwest of the city sent some units to the smaller town of Gozha. On this front they were only 40 miles from East Prussia proper, only two miles from the Suwalki triangle, which the Germans annexed to East Prussia in 1939.

Chernyakovsky was a good bet to be the first Russian commander to reach the sea, at Koenigsberg or Memel, and to cut off General Georg von Lindemann's Sixteenth and Eighteenth Armies (30 to 40 divisions) in the north. Up to this week they had made no visible move to withdraw.

Earlier, when he snuffed out the last enemy resistance in Vilna, Chernyakovsky had won Moscow's maximum victory salute: 24 rounds from 324 guns. The Germans had desperately wanted to hold Vilna, not only to keep open the exit gate from the Baltic areas, but as a shield for East Prussia. They held out longer there under attack than anywhere else in this offensive--but only for five days. Even after the city was completely surrounded, the Germans reinforced their garrison by dropping paratroopers.

Marsh Job. Sending his troops slogging through the Pripet Marshes, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky seized Pinsk, after bombarding it from gunboats sent into the Pripet River from the Dnieper. Then he started to erase the German salient in the marshes, at the base of which lay Brest-Litovsk.

General Zakharov's army overran Volkovysk, a junction on the railroad to Bialystok. General Ivan Bagramian reached far to the west of Dvinsk (still in Wehrmacht hands last week), found himself about 100 miles from the Gulf of Riga.

Man on Two Chairs. One of the bitterest blows of a bitter German week was the sudden appearance, east of the Latvian border, of stocky, limping General Andrei Yeremenko, seven-times-wounded hero of Stalingrad, Smolensk, the Crimea. Between Drissa and Pskov, quiescent up to last week, lay the last thin strip of Soviet territory still in German hands. Attacking on this 100-mile front, Yeremenko made gains up to 25 miles. On the narrow Issa River, the Germans blew up their ferries and crossings, but Yeremenko's doughty men swarmed across on small boats, rafts and logs.

This extension of the active front (to 500 miles) put the Nazi in the highly uncomfortable position of a man standing on two chairs which are being slowly pulled apart. The Germans declared that the Red offensive had spread as far south as Tarnopol, opposite Lvov. About this sector, the Russians were mum. But on their long-range goal, they were by no means mum. The Moscow radio blared: "Russian armies are smashing westward, and . . . the game is up. The Germans squealed at our declaration that we were making straight for Berlin, but these were no empty words."

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