Oil Treatment

In one week the Germans in Rumania lost the rich oil fields of Ploesti; Constanta, Rumania's chief port on the Black Sea; Bucharest, the "little Paris" of the Balkans. Worst of all, by choosing to fight for the Wallachian plain, Adolf Hitler had lost the better part of 30 divisions --which might otherwise have pulled back to defend Germany proper. Moreover the Russians, now heading for a junction with Marshal Tito's forces in Yugoslavia, threatened to cut off all the remaining Wehrmacht divisions--estimated at 15 to 20--in the southern Balkan peninsula.

Across the hot plain, through dust clouds so thick that headlights were turned on in the daytime, Marshal Rodion Mal-inovsky's men chased German remnants toward the Iron Gate, where the Danube cuts through the Transylvanian Alps. Other Malinovsky forces swarmed to the Danube and the Bulgarian border on a 65-mile front. General Feodor Tolbukhin's army group reached southern Dobruja below Constanta. This territory has been Rumania's (disregarding Hitler's 1940 rearrangements) since 1913; Russia began throwing its weight around in the Balkans by referring to it, in the Moscow communique, as Bulgarian.

This week the Germans declared that the Russians had crossed the Danube, established bridgeheads on the south bank.

Ploesti. For the Allied cause as a whole, Ploesti's capture would have been a meatier triumph six months ago than it was last week. Germany is already so parched for oil that its motorized transport is grinding to a stop on all fronts. Allied air attacks on Ploesti have reduced its rate of annual output from 5,500,000 metric tons to 2,000,000. Nevertheless Ploesti in August was still providing Germany with about one-third of its total natural and synthetic oil, and Allied airmen still bombed Ploesti as a prime target.

The Germans had done their best to defend Ploesti with heavy smoke screens, a formidable thicket of ack-ack, a strong fleet of fighters. In addition to an unknown total of U.S. airmen killed, the number shot down and captured alive in Rumania was last week disclosed as more than a thousand. The Germans had repaired bomb damage with their usual nimbleness, had covered vital pipelines and machinery with massive roofings of concrete.

They still valued Ploesti enough to put up a stout fight for it. They fought from hastily improvised fortifications and turned their antiaircraft guns on the attackers before Malinovsky's pile driver smashed them. When they fled, they fired the wells and tanks.

Bucharest. The Germans vented their fury at their lost Rumanian satellite by a savage air bombing of the capital. The famed Athenee Palace hotel and the university library were wrecked, the national theater burned to the ground. Seven hospitals were hit.

The Red tanks and cavalry entered Bucharest without a fight, and Moscow was careful not to call it a "capture," since Rumania was now an ally. But in Moscow the event was saluted with 24 salvos from the full battery of 324 guns, and the Moscow radio told how the people of Bucharest "enthusiastically hailed" the newcomers and "threw flowers at our troops."

These phenomena were not confirmed by A.P.'s Joseph Morton, who was on the spot when the dusty, sweaty Reds drove their columns through the Bucharest streets. Said Morton: "Rumanians watching the spectacle had little to offer in the way of greeting, the great majority of them staring silently. Anxiety over the proximity of Russian troops was obvious among many of Bucharest's wealthier people."

Morton also reported that "every single vehicle was American made, including jeeps, amphibious 'ducks,' command cars, trucks, and even a pale blue Ford sedan covered with a camouflage net."

North of Rumania, the long Russo-German line hardly budged. The Germans boasted that they had "stabilized" the line between the Carpathians and the Gulf of Finland, and they were in fact holding firm in front of Warsaw and East Prussia. They were clearly throwing into this theater any reinforcements they could scrape up from anywhere. Nothing more had been heard of the gap which, three weeks ago, the Germans claimed they had blasted through the Russian corridor on the Gulf of Riga (TIME, Aug. 28). If the Germans were retiring troops from Estonia and Latvia through this gap, they did not want to say so. Neither did the Russians.

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