World War: EASTERN THEATER: The Great Battle

On some perhaps distant tomorrow the world will learn what happened last week in the Battle of Russia. For the whole week the official communiques of both sides told only of heavy conflict without changes of position. But no American or British reporter, not even the British military mission, got near the front. The world was left to guess what had happened in the vicious fighting. The world will obviously learn the outcome long before it learns what led to it.

Early this week that outcome may have been foreshadowed by the German High Command—vastly more reliable than the official Nazi D.N.B. news agency—which claimed that the chief Russian forces in the center around Smolensk had been “destroyed.” Russia admitted that a powerful German pincer thrust toward Kiev had reached Belaya Tserkov, 60 miles southwest of the city.

Possibly this meant that the Nazis had chewed up two great segments of the Russian Army and were about to obtain both their central and southern objectives. If so, the Russians’ decision to stand and fight, rather than retreat as they did in Napoleon’s day, might well have led to a ghastly, crucial loss of men and materiel.

Meanwhile, something of the bitter battle that had been fought could be read between the lines of Nazi propaganda. To bolster the morale of their people at home anxiously waiting the outcome of the great battle, the Nazis pointed out that if the Russians had gone as far into Germany as the Germans have into Russia (500-600 miles), they would long since have passed Berlin and be well on their way to the Rhine.

But there were hints that the severity of the fight had been as unexpected in Berlin as in the world at large.

^ The Nazi press repeatedly railed against the Soviet soldiers as bestial, godless men who fight “unfairly.” Said a Berlin War Ministry philosopher: “Bolshevism, having killed their souls and their religion, the Russians therefore do not fear physical death and what comes after. This Eastern war is endless killing … as some human beings continue to exist although medicinal laws say they are dead, not having the necessary calories and vitamins for life, so the Russian Armies, beaten according to all the arts of war, fight on just because the political commissars order them to.”

^ Adolf Hitler’s own Volkischer Beobach-ter declared that Russia “battles with dogged tenacity . . . surpasses all previous opponents in fighting temper.”

^ Besides mud and rain (there is room for all kinds of weather on a 2,000-mile battle front), the Nazis had other excuses for the prolongation of the struggle. Wrote a German reporter attached to the Nazi Army: “This war is the driest of all wars. . . . Down deep with the pail—up it came with mire and mud. On to the next well. It yielded only a brownish broth . . . a field flask with drinking water . . . today in the East is worth more than anything that can happen to you. . . . We yearn for so much . . . for one hour without the din of battle, for one stretch of summer landscape that doesn’t smell of conflagration and death, for one walk through a street of peace with children’s laughter and clinking of glasses reaching your ear from a jolly window. Yet all this becomes threadbare and infinitesimal compared with the yearning for the great water, for water for drinking, for bathing, for nonsensical wallowing.”

Test of Strategy. Since July 16 Russia claimed to have beaten off 42 attacks on Smolensk, which Napoleon grabbed from strategic retreaters in one day. This Russian decision to stand and counterattack, however it turns out, will undoubtedly be credited to Stalin. But his chief military adviser is Vice Commissar of Defense, Marshal Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov (Joseph Stalin himself is now self-appointed Commissar).

Boris Shaposhnikov, 58, tough-faced and mild-mannered as a bulldog, planned the Finland strategies, which were lauded by most neutral observers and bungled in the field handling. He is the only Red officer to have been decorated by the Tsar, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin—testimony to a political nature as canny as it is adaptable. (Without batting an eyelash, he sat on the tribunal which court-martialed and condemned eight of his old Army colleagues, including the late, great Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky.)

Son of a minor civil-service employe, Marshal Shaposhnikov was born in the town of Zlatoust in the Urals, in 1910 was top man at the Moscow Imperial Academy. By 1917 he had become a Tsarist colonel. The next year he joined the Red Army and became a prime strategist of the war on the Whites. He has been an active Commander of the Leningrad, Moscow and Volga military districts, Chief of Staff, head of the Frunze Military Academy (Soviet West Point), and he joined Comrade Stalin at the signing of the Russo-German Pact (see cut). But his reputation has always been technical, bolstered by his authorship of several volumes of military history and strategy.

This week, Marshal Shaposhnikov may learn whether he has made a bad mistake in strategy. His decision to stand undoubtedly inflicted heavy losses on the Germans. But the vital question for Russia is whether its own Army is still intact. For the war will be over if the Russian Army is destroyed.