Thunder & Silence

West of Shavh, a rail-junction town in northern Lithuania, Red Army guns thundered. By the Berlin radio's account, the Russians "launched a new offensive with armored and battle formations after subjecting the main German defense line to a drumfire barrage of heaviest caliber." Berlin added that the penetrations achieved were "temporary."

Berlin was mistaken. Moscow kept mum for four days, then broke the news with a victory salute from 224 guns: the Red armies had jammed through for gains up to 60 miles on a 175-mile front. This week they had sent the Germans reeling back to within twelve miles of Memel on the sea, to within three miles of the northern East Prussia border. Credit went to Generals Ivan Bagramian and Ivan Chernyakhovsky, who figured much more prominently in the Eastern Front news last July than they have lately.

The Russians claimed that they had 15 enemy divisions "on the verge" of entrapment between Memel and Riga. Allied observers took this with some salt, recalling that when Bagramian drove to the Gulf of Riga last summer, 20 to 30 German divisions were supposed to have been bottled up in the north. The net bag, when that region was finally cleaned up last month, was not much more than five divisions.

The real significance of the new offensive was that it marked the impending close of the Baltic campaign. Soon the Russians would have eight whole army groups north of the Carpathians with nothing left to attack but East Prussia and the line from that province through Warsaw to the upper Vistula--sectors which seemed long overdue for attention.

The Warsaw Tragedy. The sounds of battle between Polish partisans and Germans in Warsaw died out. The spokesman and leader of the partisans, the man who made himself known to the world as General Bor, flashed a message to the Polish government in London: "Warsaw has fallen after exhausting all supplies and ammunition on the 63rd day of the struggle. . . ." Then Bor surrendered to the Germans with his garrison, his staff and his wife, who had borne a child during the uprising.

Previously, the London Poles had disclosed that Bor was Lieut. General Tadeusz Komorowski, a regular-army cavalry officer. Blue-eyed, dapper, cleanshaven, lean and tall, he was born 46 years ago near Lvov, fought the Germans in the last war, was slightly wounded in Warsaw, later became an officer and attended the Ecole de Guerre in Paris. He was commanding a cavalry brigade in 1939 when Poland fell. In the summer of 1943 General Wladislaw Sikorsky appointed him chief of the Polish underground, less than 24 hours before Sikorsky was killed in an airplane crash. The Germans were said to have put 200 agents on his track, a price of $1,600,000 on his head.

Last week they canceled this price, accepted Komorowski and all his surviving partisans as prisoners of war in good standing. Obviously the Nazis hoped to profit by the political reverberations and implications of the Warsaw tragedy (see FOREIGN NEWS). The military fact was ugly enough: thousands of Poles had fought bravely and died heroically in Warsaw without advancing the Allied cause by a single mile or a single hour.

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