The Marshal Waits

The tempo of Russian attack east of Berlin hung at a sullen, persistent roar. After a week's bitter fighting the Germans claimed that: 1) they still held the essential battlements of Kuestrin, which Marshal Joseph Stalin had declared captured; 2) the battered keystones of their Oder River defense line still stood.

Radio Berlin grew boastful. It described spokes of dragon's teeth, pillboxes and larger fortifications around the capital. Loudspeakers proclaimed that the city's bombed ruins had been turned into a gun-studded fortress.

No one knew better than Berliners that Berlin would need all this and more. The Red Army's Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, though striking hard, had yet to launch his hardest blows. South of Berlin, Marshal Ivan S. Konev's forces smashed from Oder bases toward the Czechoslovakian border. North of Berlin, Zhukov drove for the old Baltic port of Stettin, tried to tear loose this anchor of the Oder River line.

Grown suddenly alarmed, the German radio called Zhukov's attack "murderous." Soviet formations, in actions reminiscent of Belleau Wood, squeezed the Germans from the Kluetzer forest southeast of the city. They converged on Altdamm, four miles east of the city. Along a six-mile stretch the Russians stood looking across the mile-wide river marshes at the smoking shambles of Stettin.

Behind Zhukov the armies of the Second and Third White Russian Fronts hammered down the resistance pockets the Germans had left in East Prussia and the Polish Corridor. They took the town of Brandenburg on the east and neared Braunsberg on the west sides of the pocket below Konigsberg. In twin battles to the west they fought for the ports of Danzig and Gdynia.

With each victory the Red lines shortened. More & more troops turned away, painted "to Berlin" and "to Stettin" on their tanks and vehicles, and hurried to join Zhukov. These were the men Marshal Zhukov awaited, the men to strengthen his lines for the final blow through the Oder defenses to Berlin and beyond.

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