Staggering Blow

In the ugly Dabrowa district of hilly southern Silesia, the Russians scored a vast victory this week. Beuthen, Katowice, Hindenburg, Gleiwitz, Sosnowiec--the complex of mining, refining, steelmaking, oil-synthesizing cities--were in Russian hands.

The Germans were staggered. It was a cruel blow. At Gleiwitz was a synthetic fuel plant that employed 38,000. It had been moved to "safe" Silesia from the air-vulnerable Ruhr. Near by was a great new engine works, also built far from the Allied bomber fields. At Beuthen was the biggest zinc mine in Europe. Out of Katowice had poured automobiles, chemicals, machine tools. Out of the basin had gone much of the coal for the industries and railroads of the eastern Reich and Czechoslovakia.

Silesia Kaput. Official Berlin was staggered. Bluntly, it told the German people that Silesia had been written off, that the Reich's second most important industrial area was a place for house-to-house battling. Even as the Germans heard that agonizing news, the street battles were ended.

Moscow quoted a prisoner, Captain Friedrich Gnehweiss: "I can't understand it. You advance from the east, but you attack from the west, south and north. I've lost 90% of my men even though through all these days I was only running away."

The German command was plainly shaken. It was not proper that Marshal Ivan Konev's First Ukrainian Army had been able to penetrate six deep belts of defense between the starting point of his offensive and Gleiwitz. It was not in the books that his Russians could so quickly chew up the ring of gun points, trenches, minefields, tank traps that circled Gleiwitz and the other heavily populated cities.

Gleiwitz Kaput. The taking of Gleiwitz had been typical of Konev's technique. All through the fortified belts his tank-tipped spearheads had been in too much of a hurry to fight. If they rolled up to a strong point, they veered off until they found a soft spot, then zipped through. They had gone so fast that, in some cases, prepared defenses were not even manned.

The Russians made for Gleiwitz frontally--where the defense belt was deepest. Near it they veered a dozen miles to the north, found the weakness, came up on the main Katowice-Berlin highway. A fast run up the Autostrasse to important Breslau was the reasonable thing for the Germans to expect. Instead, Konev's tanks turned left, cut cross-country to a road that entered Gleiwitz from the southwest.

Gleiwitz was also typical of the Russians' complexity of maneuver all along the front. The industrial basin had not been Konev's only aim. More important was his second objective: crossing the unfrozen Oder River.

Over the River. While Konev was spearing into the Dabrowa, he had also fanned out northward, bypassed and besieged Breslau, spread his tanks along the upper "Rhine of the East." By this week (by German account) he was across it at more than a dozen places. One crossing was reported 50 miles northwest of Breslau. At this point he was within 125 miles of Berlin.

As Konev had gone--speedily, apparently with power to spare--so had gone the huge tides of Marshal Georgy Zhukov's First White Russian Army, aimed at Berlin. Zhukov's technique was based on three waves of attack: 1) the tanks and enough men and gasoline trucks to keep them going; 2) mobile infantry, to hold the sides of the wedge against counterattack; 3) massed infantry to do the bloody, unsung job of mopping up the enemy.

Over the Border. Zhukov had also made dramatic advances. By this week his waves had lapped entirely around Poznan, 180 miles west of Warsaw. Two widening spears thrust over the Reich's borders, less than 80 miles from Frankfort on the Oder.

The possibilities of the Konev and Zhukov drives were tremendous. Konev presumably had the power to expand his Silesian grip toward richer industrial prizes in Czechoslovakia. But his grip on the Oder was a strategic threat. Linked with Zhukov's advance, it could be forged into the familiar pattern of Red Army bridgeheads established in force far from the ultimate objective. Thus the Sandomierz grip on the upper Vistula had been the springboard for the present offensive. Thus the crossing of the Danube far south in Yugoslavia had brought the toppling of Budapest. So the Oder--the last wide ditch before Berlin--might be enveloped in preparation for Zhukov's frontal assault.

Over Again. Zhukov had linked his power in the north with that of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky's Second White Russian Army. Russian spearheads passed the Reich's borders, cut the main Berlin-Danzig railroad, surrounded Schneidemuehl, an anchor point on the prewar defense wall Germany had built facing Poland. The main objective: Stettin (see map).

It was time for a critical German decision: where to stabilize a line for the great defensive battle on which the war's outcome might hinge. If the Red marshals could fight as smartly during the next few weeks, with the same daring and deceptively complex tactics, there was no certainty that the enemy might ever stabilize a line short of Berlin's east-side slums.

There was Russian power everywhere. The German garrison at Memel, which had held a last fragment of Lithuania since October, was overcome. And nearly 600 miles to the south, below Budapest, the Russians suddenly pushed out in new attacks.

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