Fragments

The Germans no longer had much semblance of a line on the Eastern Front, except on maps. They had only bloody, bewildered fragments of armies, of divisions, tossed about and swallowed like debris in a tidal wave. On some sectors, on some days, the Red spearheads covered 30 miles, a creditable pace for a peacetime army on maneuvers. It meant that there were no Germans in their path at those points, or not enough to matter.

Viewed as the result of purely military factors, such a degree of Nazi confusion and demoralization" was fantastic. It was believable only as arising in part from the long-smoldering crisis in Germany's High Command which exploded last week (see The Enemy). It was in Russia that Hitler's "fight for every mile" policy had been reduced to the most utter and glaring bankruptcy. It is hard for a commander to follow orders that he knows to be ridiculous. If he knows there is trouble where the orders come from, it is only human and natural for him to hope they will be changed.

The Bleak Province. Probably the most conservative general would have agreed with Hitler that Germany must defend East Prussia, the bleak province which is supposed to breed the "iron bowels" of the Junkers. On the sector covering East Prussia, from Kaunas to Grodno, the Russians paused for a whole week. The natural defenses before them--swamps, lakes and dense forests--were forbidding. The man-made defenses, particularly the strategic network of railways built long ago, were equally formidable. In this treacherous country, the Tsarist armies of World War I suffered their first great defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg.

So long as the Red Armies delayed an attack on East Prussia, the exit gate for the German Armies in the Baltic provinces stood open. But the Nazis were in dire peril. Having carved a huge salient in Lithuania, General Bagramian was closer last week to Riga than General Chernyakhovsky, at the Suwalki triangle, was to Konigsberg. Yet a breakthrough to Riga would bring in only part of the bag. Pulling the drawstring at Konigsberg might be more difficult, but it would pay off more handsomely.

The Last Town. Almost everywhere else on the 750-mile front from Lake Peipus to Stanislavov, the Russians made enormous gains. Pskov, the last Russian town held by the Germans, fell to the armies of Colonel General Ivan Masslennikov, another newcomer to this front who had distinguished himself in the Caucasus.

It was in south Poland that the German disintegration was most apparent. Here the Germans had feared the first and heaviest Red blows. Yet here they crumbled as abjectly as everywhere else. Lublin was reached in a giant stride covering 50 miles in two days. This week it fell.

Brest-Litovsk, the great Nazi fortress in Poland east of Warsaw, was almost encircled at week's end, and Red artillery was pulverizing its garrison. Joseph Stalin & Co. would no doubt find a saturnine pleasure in dictating peace terms at Brest-Litovsk. It was there, on March 3, 1918, that the Kaiser's men, "sword in hand," laid down their harsh peace terms to the representatives of Trotsky and Lenin.

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