BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Stalin’s Liubimefs

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The Germans are losing the war in Russia, which means that they are losing World War II.

On the frozen plains of Rzhev before Moscow, on the Don and in the Volga corridor at Stalingrad, in the snows and floods of the Caucasus, the Russians are on the offensive. But, as of this week, the Russian offensives alone are not defeating the Germans.

Time is defeating the Germans. Old victories and old defeats are defeating the Germans: the Red Army’s stands, retreats and counterattacks; the Wehrmacht’s losses at Smolensk, Rzhev and Moscow; the men and weapons spent, the weeks forever lost at Sevastopol; the spaces of the Ukraine, the Kuban plains and the upper Caucasus, conquered but nonetheless expensive to their conquerors; and, finally, the pit of Stalingrad. No one of these great battles, sieges or marches in the greatest campaign of history exhausted or defeated the German Army. But in the aggregate they saved Russia and they saved the Red Army.

Without this perspective, dispatches and headlines inevitably give the impression that the Russians stand to win all or lose all in their first winter offensives of 1942. The impression is not shared by the hard-eyed, hard-mouthed peasant, Communist and soldier, Army General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who commands the drive on the Rzhev front and had much to do with planning the others.

The Bridge. After the fashion of soldiers in all armies, the men of Engineer Sosnovkin’s little command grumbled and, cursed. They knew well enough that the instructions came from General Mukhim, the commander on their sector of the Rzhev front. They supposed that General Mukhim had his orders from a man whom they seldom or never saw, whose name they almost never read in Red Star or Pravda, a man whom they all knew as the Liubimets (the pet, the favorite, the darling, the beloved) of the Red Army. But it was Engineer Sosnovkin, thin and unimpressive in his grey overcoat, who had to tell the men what General Zhukov, the Liubimets, now wanted of them.

He wanted them to build a bridge. This bridge was to span a river near Rzhev. On the bank opposite the Russians, the Germans were waiting & watching. Yet this bridge had to be so devised that the Germans would neither see the men while they were building it, nor see the bridge after it was built. The men gaped at Engineer Sosnovkin, and in their individual ways pondered the demands of the insatiable Liubimets. Then they went to work.

Engineer Sosnovkin decided to build his bridge in sections, 18 inches below the river’s surface. For many nights his men practiced underwater construction on their side of the river, in a spot out of sight of the Germans. They set log pillars firmly in stone foundations. They clamped crosspieces to the pillars with oiled nuts and bolts. In the freezing water and darkness they did, it all by touch.

The Russian bank where the bridge was to be built was low, flat and easily seen by the Germans atop their high, sheer bank. Engineer Sosnovkin therefore decided to build his bridge backwards from the German side, beginning it in the shelter of the high bank. On a night when clouds hid the moon and snow shrouded the river, the strongest swimmers crossed with the foundation stones in stretchers and in their tunics. Others swam with the logs. Blue-black with cold, praying that the ice along the bank would not crack and betray them by the sound, they laid the first sections in utter silence. Chest-deep in the waters near the bank, they were cut, bloodied and sometimes knocked off their feet by ice floes. Once the Germans sensed that something was up and fired aimlessly at the dark river, wounding several Russian sappers. But Engineer Sosnovkin’s men returned a second, night and a third. Unseen by the Germans, they completed their bridge.

On a morning chosen by the Liubimets, Engineer Sosnovkin placed stakes on the thin sheet of ice just above his bridge.

Then he stood in his grey coat by the river and waited. Russian artillery suddenly loosed a great barrage. Engineer Sosnovkin saw the puffs of the shells bursting in the German positions. From the woods behind him, Russian tanks, whitened for winter war, snouted down to the bank, crunched through the ice and found his bridge. In squadron after squadron they charged toward the stupefied Germans and opened the Rzhev offensive.

The Hedgehogs. The cities of Rzhev and Vyazma lie a-flank Moscow, some 125 miles to the northwest and southwest (see map). Connecting them with Smolensk, Vitebsk, the town of Velikie Luki and nearby Toropets to the northeast are railways and roads, now the military arteries of a fortified rectangle. Against the eastern edge of this rectangle, between Rzhev and Vyazma, and against the upper edge just west of Rzhev and on two sides of Velikie Luki, the Russians drove last week. Their purpose was to surround both places, to cut the railways and roads serving them and the whole German system before Moscow, then by progressive sweeps to reduce and occupy the entire area.

The Russians cut the railway between Rzhev and Vyazma. They cut the chief highway serving Rzhev. They cut two railways north and south of Velikie Luki. They took positions between Velikie Luki and the pivotal German strongpoint at Toropets. Artillery, tanks and infantry, including ski troops, within 48 hours had repeatedly broken through the outer line of the rectangle, flowed around the German’s mighty fortress at Rzhev and all but isolated some 75,000 German troops there. Very near Rzhev, where Red Army troops had won a foothold last September, they attacked the suburbs of the city itself.

Red Star said that the Russians had captured a German document, quoting

Hitler to his commanders in the area: “The advance of Soviet troops to the [Rzhev-Vyazma] railroad line will create a serious threat to Rzhev and a loss equivalent to the loss of half of Berlin.” The Russians also said that a German tank commander had sent word for “help today—tomorrow will be too late.”

Yet, after Moscow had announced the first penetration, the Russians for days claimed almost no specific gains. There was a reason, and it was not necessarily that the offensive was failing: the German salient was designed expressly to withstand just such attacks and to survive just such penetrations.

Rzhev, key to the German system, is one great nest of tank traps, mine fields, barbed wire, artillery emplacements and pillboxes for riflemen and machine-gunners. Nearly every building is a fort. But the defense works between Rzhev and the other cities and towns of the system are not solid lines. They are deep, broken lines of highly fortified “hedgehogs,” each self-sufficient, each designed to withstand encirclement, to serve as a base for counterattacking tanks, artillerymen and infantry, to grind attacking forces between the many strongpoints.

The Task. “Breakthroughs” in such lines mean almost nothing. Cutting the roads and railways means little more. Both Rzhev and Velikie Luki were surrounded last winter. Rzhev was partly encircled in August and September, during a Red offensive which seemed to be a failure at the time but may have been only in preparation for the great winter show. Siege was what the Germans’ siege points were built for and supplied to resist.

The Russians gave a clue to their task when they said of the fighting around Velikie Luki that their forces now had to reduce the Germans’ “encircled positions.” The crucial battle was a slow, brutal, man-devouring series of struggles for the hedgehogs.

In scope and intensity, the offensive exceeded its counter-parts of last winter on the central front. London heard that Joseph Stalin was with his Litibimets at field headquarters. The Germans, who for weeks had observed, reported and presumably countered the Russians’ preparations, said that fighting was in progress from Kalinin, north of Moscow, to Lake Ilmen below Leningrad. No one outside the Red Army command knew precisely what Stalin and General Zhukov hoped for. But at least their offensive provided a tremendous diversion, supporting the Red Army’s drives in the south. At most it might lift the Nazi threat to Moscow with the capture of Rzhev, tear apart the Germans’ entire winter line, lead to the relief of desperate Leningrad, bring the Russians to Latvia and the gates of Adolf Hitler’s inner fortress.

These possibilities, immense in themselves, looked even more immense in comparison with the Russians’ early claims. If the advance was slow and painful, it was probably no more so than the Russians expected.

The Tide. If the offensive on the central front had the possibilities of a great victory, the Red Army’s offensive at Stalingrad had the appearance of one in the making.

In the second week of their culminating blow — and the tenth of Marshal Semion Timoshenko’s long effort to break into the Don elbow and relieve Stalingrad from the German rear — the Russians won the positions from which they must now fight for the victory. They cleaned the Germans from a great, thinly defended patch, 50 to 100 miles deep, within the Don bend and west of the corridor between the Don and the Volga. They forced the Germans to establish a defense line on the Don’s eastern bank, with their backs to Stalingrad, facing the Russians on the western bank. Then they broke the line by a brilliant assault upon the bedeviled Germans’ new rear.

According to the Russians, they controlled the Germans’ only main railways into Stalingrad, and even held a spur running westward from Stalingrad to the Don. The Red Army apparently also held or dominated most of the German highway routes.

On the face of these reports, an Axis army of some 300,000 Germans and Rumanians was all but bottled up in Stalingrad and on the Stalingrad steppes. The encirclement, capture or destruction of this army, along with the loss of the Germans’ pivotal position in southern Russia, would be for Hitler a catastrophe greater than the disaster in Libya.

Yet the German High Command was strangely calm last week. Neither official communiques nor Axis broadcasts reflected the hysteria which has attended the Germans’ previous setbacks in Russia.

The Germans capped their apparent calm with a report similar in tone to their accurate (and equally unflurried) forecast of the Rzhev offensive. They said that at Voronezh, where the Russians last summer kept a foothold on the Don 300 miles northwest of Stalingrad, the Red Army was assembling forces for a third offensive southward toward Rostov.

Such an offensive, if successful, would: 1) complete the entrapment of the Axis armies in the Don-Volga area; 2) bar the Germans’ way of retreat to their last summer’s line (Taganrog-Kharkov-Kursk-Orel) ; 3) finally doom the halting German drive in the Caucasus, perhaps cut off the Caucasian armies’ last line of supply and retreat through the Crimea; 4) force the Germans to draw further on their dwindling reserves.

Zhukov. Joseph Stalin keeps his chosen advisers close by him. Army General Zhukov, at 45 (or 48, some say) officially a Hero of the Soviet Union, wearer of the Order of Lenin and victor over the Japanese in Mongolia, is First Vice Commissar for Defense and second only to Commissar Joseph Stalin in U.S.S.R. military councils.

Georgy Zhukov fought in the Red Revolution, served and studied under the Red Army’s famed mentor, Mikhail Frunze. He is a horseman and hunter, was successively a teacher at military schools, a staff officer and a field commander in the pre-1941 Red Army. Even Russians know little else about him, for General Zhukov has made it his business to stay out of the public prints and eye.

The few foreigners who have seen him remember him best for his “lion’s face,” his broad and rocky mouth. Like all successful Red Army commanders, he is a professing Communist and (unlike some) he is also a devout one. Said he after the Finnish War: “We would not be Bolsheviks if we allowed the glamor of victory to blind us to the shortcomings that have been revealed in the training of our men. These shortcomings were the result of conventionalism and routine.”

Well before the U.S. Army learned the same lesson, General Zhukov began to apply it to the Red Army. Along with Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov, he braced up Red Army training, brought it as closely as possible to actual conditions of modern warfare. After the Germans suddenly brought war in earnest to the Russians, Stalin entrusted Zhukov with the outer defenses of Moscow, and with the winter offensive which pushed the Germans back to their present line at Rzhev. Last summer, when the Germans launched their 1942 campaign, Zhukov still had the central front, and he was responsible for holding the Russians’ all-important pivot at Voronezh.

Last August Stalin designated Zhukov First Vice Commissar for Defense, but left him in command of the central front. For reasons known only at the Kremlin, he also left him with his title of Army General, one degree below Marshals Shaposhnikov, Timoshenko, Voroshilov, et al. Marshal Shaposhnikov lately has been ill, and in the months when Stalin was planning his winter offensives he turned more & more to his Liubimets.

General Zhukov shares with most Russians the conviction that the German armies are not yet beaten, that they can be defeated only by a prodigious effort. He also knows that the Red Army, to win this winter, must show more offensive capacity than it has ever shown before.

The Red Army is well equipped—superbly equipped considering Russia’s wartime poverty—chiefly because its leaders, General Zhukov included, had the wit and, courage to retain and build up great reserves of munitions when the richest lands and cities of Russia were falling to the Germans. The true extent of those reserves, known only to the Red Army command, is one of the factors which will determine the course and outcome of the winter’s battles. And if worse comes to worst and the winter offensives fail, Joseph Stalin, Georgy Zhukov and the rest of the Red Army command will save enough of their reserves to try again.