While Berlin Waits

The long, narrow spearhead that Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov had thrust toward Berlin broadened out. While Zhukov paused, Marshal Ivan S. Konev hammered into line on his left. The Red armies were linked along the east bank of the Oder, their flanks more secure.

Now spearheads on the west bank could reach farther. Konev columns snaked around Breslau, sealed off Silesia's largest city, locked up its garrison. Red Army Tommy gunners broke into the town, began a grim house-to-house fight.

Another Konev column plunged nearer to Dresden. Still another surged up the Autobahn toward Berlin's southern gates, in a drive aimed through the Cottbus rail center. Hard fighting raged inside the walled, medieval town of Guben, communications center 65 miles southeast of the Reich's capital. Great clouds of smoke, rising from fires set by British and American airmen, beckoned them on.

Shaping Up. Still Zhukov hesitated before Berlin, waiting while the whole line assumed the same curving shape it had held on the Vistula, on the Dnieper. Along the Oder, Red Army engineers split boxlike German windmills to build barges for their tanks.

These Russians looked about them at Germany. Wrote one Red Army correspondent: "The sky is the same. The earth is the same. There are the same lakes and swamps all cut with dykes. But morally this place gives our men a huge, incomparable satisfaction understandable only to a Soviet man."

Men wondered what had happened to the Germans. Here & there they stabbed at the Red forces, everywhere they fought desperately to hold, but they had not struck out in a full-scale counterattack as they had done four historic times before to check Russian offensives. Surrounded in cities behind the Russian lines were an estimated 650,000 Germans. Perhaps the long drain on manpower was at last beginning to tell. The 50-day agony of Budapest, one of the surrounded strong points, came to an end. The guns fell silent and out of the rubble crawled the garrison, 110,000 dazed men. Red Army soldiers moved in, flushed the Nazi commander, Colonel General Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, out of a sewer.

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