Prongs of Steel

The Russians heaved and sweated to keep step with their western Allies. All along the front Red Army marshals tugged at the handles of giant war prongs, drove jagged tearing teeth into the German lines.

One set of prongs cut up from Hungary and down from Silesia, ripping toward the Bohemian bastion. In three months Colonel General Johannes Friessner had sacrificed four of his eleven armored divisions to drive the Russians back from the southern entrances to this natural fortress.

Generals Forward. But now in Hungary Marshal Fedor I. Tolbukhin, the bull-like, flower-loving Ferdinand of the Red Army, sent the 60 generals of his Third Ukrainian Army group forward. By their side moved 27 generals of Marshal Rodion Y. Malinovsky's Second Ukrainian Army group and a Red Fleet Rear Admiral of the Danube Flotilla. Along a 90-mile front, from Lake Balaton to the Danube, 1,000,000 Russians were on the march. Others stormed over the Hron River north of the Danube.

And in Silesia stocky Marshal Ivan S. Konev's First Ukrainian Army group hammered southward from its Oder bridgehead. Konev's troops neared the gateway to the Ziegenhals Pass, and the Czechoslovakian city of Moravska Ostrava, guarding the Moravian Gap.

Bloody Prelude. In the 17-by-6-mile Oder bridgehead directly east of Berlin, Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, the Nazis said, had packed some 72,000 Red Army soldiers and more than 400 tanks. They clawed their way through Kustrin fortress, reached within 31 miles of the capital. But this, added the Germans, was only the prelude to the real Battle of Berlin.

Nervously they looked southward, where Zhukov was reported to have 1,200,000 men massed, waiting for the flooded Oder to return to its. banks. Northward the Red Marshal's columns smashed their way into Altdamm, the last German position on the right bank of the Oder.

To the east Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky split land communications between Danzig and Gdynia and was closing a double set of prongs on the two cities. Farther east Marshal Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky, 47-year-old Cossack, took Braunsberg, one-time stronghold of the Teutonic Knights.

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