Counterattack

Mortally wounded though it was, the Wehrmacht lashed back last week at the Red colossus with the heaviest German counterattacks since the start of the Soviet offensive in late June. The Germans had traded too much space for too little time; now there was nothing left to trade but flesh and steel.

A German broadcast quoted Field Marshal Walter Model, commanding the Warsaw sector: "After weeks of receding, the time has come to stick to our positions. New forces from the Reich are arriving. "By Moscow account, the Germans had thrown into the fight 16 divisions scraped up from western Poland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Norway.

Joseph Stalin's strong and confident armies regathered their strength before striking again. The wonder was not that the Russians' advance had slackened, but that it had not slackened sooner. The Russians needed to build up new forward communication lines, to move up their forward air elements, to sort out masses of men and supplies.

They had a six-to-one superiority in the air. They had artillery to deal with the tanks which the enemy hurled recklessly at them--they knocked out 1,000 German tanks in a week. There was plenty of time. It was three months before the autumn rains would drench the Polish flatlands.

Plight of the Partisans. The Soviet pause in front of Warsaw left the Polish partisans, who had risen up against the Germans in the city, in a desperate fix.The underground leader, General Bor, complained that Red artillery had not been heard on the Warsaw approaches since Aug. 3. Unless help arrived soon, he said, his patriot forces would be "totally exterminated." The Germans were attacking with planes and tanks; the partisans had no artillery.

Moscow seemed to feel that this uprising, which had been touched off by the Polish leaders in London, was none of Moscow's affair. London's Communist paper, the Daily Worker, declared that the revolt was a "bluff" staged by the London Poles to get credit for Warsaw's liberation. It appeared that the Red Army commander had not been consulted, nor had the Moscow-sponsored Polish Committee of Liberation.

Allied officials were in a quandary when Polish air crews and airborne troops in Britain volunteered to go to the aid of the Warsaw patriots. How could they be sent with hope of success across the whole of Germany? How could they even effectively drop supplies and ammunition from the air when, in fluctuating street-to-street fighting, the material was more likely than not to fall into German hands? Probing the Bag. A Red Army spokesman said that Warsaw was one of those places "which have to be captured from all sides." Last week Marshal Rokossovsky's army group gained ground north of the city, in attacks toward the Warsaw-Bialystok railroad. Some 100 miles to the south, in sweltering hot weather, Marshal Konev fought off repeated German tank and infantry attacks, developed a huge salient across the Vistula, from which a northward drive toward Warsaw might roll up the Germans on the west bank.

Meanwhile, the Russians leisurely probed their squirming bag of 30 German divisions trapped in Latvia and Estonia by the Red drive to the Gulf of Riga. General Yeremenko attacked along the Dvina River toward Riga. General Masslenikov started a sweep northward along the west shore of Lake Peipus.

The Russians also probed East Prussia--cautiously. Here if anywhere the enemy was girded for a last-ditch fight. In ten days, the Germans dug 1,800 miles of trenches, and Russian patrols reported a proliferation of machine-gun nests, antitank ditches. The Germans called out every able-bodied man & woman between 15 and 65 to work on the defenses.

On the East Prussian border, General Chernyakhovsky's armies weathered one fierce counterattack after another, waited for the convulsions to die out. Inside the border, the Germans burned farm buildings--the first humiliating scorching of their own earth in this war.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.