BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Two Men, Two Faces

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Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the German commander in south Russia, would have esteemed Vassily Kochetkov, a junior lieutenant of the Red Army. Bock commanded 1,000,000 or more men, fighting for Stalingrad, the Volga and the Caucasus. Junior Lieut. Kochetkov commanded 16 Red Guardsmen holding a hillock before Stalingrad.

At dawn twelve of Bock’s tanks climbed the hillock toward the swallow’s nest of trenches and light fortifications where Kochetkov and his men lay. The Guardsmen had only rifles and hand grenades. Kochetkov was wounded. His Guardsmen spoke briefly to him, and he to them. Four of them fastened grenades to their thick leather belts. Each of the four chose a tank, ran down the hill, and dived headlong. Eight tanks were left. Six of the eight tanks turned and retreated. The two others crawled on toward the Guardsmen’s nest. By then only Kochetkov and three Guardsmen were alive. The three soldiers placed Kochetkov in a trench, laced grenades to their belts, and ran to meet the tanks. Junior Lieut. Kochetkov was alone when a Red detachment found him. He told the newcomers what his men had done, and said: “They will live forever.” Junior Lieut. Kochetkov then died.

Eventually, the Germans took the hill. Upon a map at Bock’s headquarters, many miles from the fighting, a pin moved. The Field Marshal’s green eyes glowed. The forward dance of the pins on the map meant to him, too, that men were dying. It was a meaning that, for him and his Prussian kind, was as real as it was for all the Kochetkovs on the hills. And too much death, Bock knew, can stop the movement of the pins—it stopped them last fall when he threw his armies in costly assaults upon Moscow.

Bock, the Prussian, born in a Prussian fortress 61 years ago, required men to die for the Fatherland, for the glory of arms, for themselves (“Our profession should always be crowned by heroic death in battle”). Once he had commanded men to die for the Emperor. Now, with impersonal fervor, he said: “For the Führer.” He expected them to die only when necessary, and then to die coldly (“The ideal soldier thinks only when ordered to do so”). His role was not to lead them into battle, or to die with them, but to see that they had an unfailing supply of battle leaders and battle tools; and this he did with cool and consummate mastery of his art.

In his chill mouth, the lean rigor of his face, the green blaze in his eyes, many German women have found something fearful and attractive. Common soldiers, and even his fellow Prussians, sometimes saw in him a quality which they shunned and derided. They called him der Sterber (“the Dier”). They called themselves “Bock’s own dying heroes.” But, at his command, they fought well, and by the thousands they died. With the abundance of guns, tanks and planes which Bock gave them, they drove the men of the Red Army from the hills, the valleys and the villages before Stalingrad.

Over the bodies of Russians who died fighting, the Germans advanced. With every mile lost and every day gone, Russia seemed to have fewer guns, tanks and planes for her sons. One of her sons composed a sparse communiqué in Moscow:

“Our troops, after fierce defensive fighting, evacuated three populated places.”

One by one, the pins danced forward on the Prussians’ map.

See the Faces. Men of other nations read the news from the Volga. They were told what defeat at Stalingrad would mean: victory for the Germans in their summer campaign; a Russia dismembered, isolated, weakened; German hordes and German planes free for battle in western Europe or in the Middle East; a disaster possibly worse than all the other disasters of World War II. With these possibilities only too imminent, it was easy, now, to believe that the cold, harsh face of Bock could turn into the face of victory for Hitler and the Germans. That face was everywhere in Russia. It was the face of Dietl on the Finnish front, where the Russians fought to keep their access to the North Atlantic. It was the face of Leeb on the northern front, where the Russians were reduced to sending training planes with bombs against the German ring around Leningrad. It was the face of List on the Central front, where the Russians at Rzhev fought to press the Germans back from Moscow’s door, but had yet to press them far enough. It was the face of the German in the North Caucasus; in the streets of Novorossiisk (the Red Fleet’s fallen base on the Black Sea); in the oilfields of Grozny; halfway from Rostov to the great oil prize of Baku.

President Roosevelt had said: “Russia will hold out.” Winston Churchill had said: “It is the eighth of September,” inviting the Russians and their allies to believe that winter, if not the Second Front, was coming soon enough to founder the German armies. The Russians were nearer to the German face. They said: “Yes, Sept. 8—and now it is the middle of September, but Molotov called on you in May. Where are your armies?” The Russians knew what the Russian calendar and the record of the Russian war to date had yet to teach Messrs. Roosevelt and Churchill:

Winter alone will not halt the Germans, nor rob them of their summer gains. (After one bitter winter in Russia the German armies came back to strike at Stalingrad and the Caucasus.) The snows which soon will block the high Caucasian passes will not block the low roads along the Black and Caspian Seas to Batum, Baku and the Middle East. Only the Red Armies in the Caucasus—so far unable to block the approaches, and soon likely to be cut off from the body of Russia—can block the roads. Winter will not sink the Germans’ motor barges, skirting the Russian strong points on the Caspian’s narrow shore. If winter is all that Russia’s allies can promise, and Russia cannot save herself, then the war in Russia is lost.

See the Face. Yet there was hope on the Russian battlefields. It was not solely the fact that Bock and his Germans had yet to win Stalingrad, the lower Volga and the Caucasus. It was not the hope, almost the certainty, that if all was lost in the south, if the Red Army was no longer the saving bulwark of the U.S. and Great Britain, Russia would still survive for the Russians. It was not the hope, which even the hard-minded Russians seized and fondled last week, that the German losses in south Russia was irreparably weakening the German armies.

The hope was in “those grey-eyed, broad-faced, frowning, sweating, swearing Russians.” It was in the quiet battalions of Red soldiers, suddenly appearing in Murmansk and laboring through the night to repair the bombed wharves; then, at the end of overnight leave, returning to the northern front.

It was three young officers of the Red Army, gratefully accepting Philip Morris cigarets from a U.S. correspondent, stamping loudly on the Moscow sidewalk, and saying with simple certainty that the Germans could not win.

It was the testimony, eloquent in every Russian, that thought and belief in the mother country were still worth having and keeping whole in the hearts of the nation’s valiant soldiers.

It was the Russian faith, battered but not yet destroyed, that the good men of Britain and the U.S. would join the Red Army against Hitler while there yet was time; that from Russia’s allies would yet come the action and the weapons which alone could arm and preserve the Russian faith.

It was the face of Junior Lieut. Kocketkov, stilled and unassailable on a Russian hill, saying to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock:

“They will never die.”