World War: EASTERN THEATER: Decision in a Week?

After seven days of fighting, the German High Command was convinced its armies had defeated Russia’s. The German High Command has, to most of the world’s misfortune, not yet been wrong.

The first seven days were days of mystery. Citizens of the outside world could only ponder the oddities of totalitarian propaganda; look at German pictures of happy byplay in captured villages; muse on Russian geography—Dvinsk here, Pinsk there, Minsk in between; and take their pick between diametric optimism.

“A heavy defeat was inflicted on the enemy,” the Russian communique would say.

“Our troops,” the German communique would say on the same day, “obtained big decisions, which will be made known short-ly.”

Reporting by official and neutral news agencies was dreamy, unreal, ridiculously ironic. D.N.B. told of Alpine troops fighting on Ukraine’s plains; Tass described Germans rushing into battle “in a drunken condition,” Rumanians being pushed into battle at the bayonet’s point; and though there had never been such vastnesses, the world’s press was overfed with vignettes —a number of Russian peasants capturing three parachutists, two planes dropping eight bombs which killed a postman and burned two barns at Tammisaari, Finland.

A pall of smoke was reported over Leningrad. A cloud of dust hid the battlefield north of the Pripet Marshes. A German reporter in a Stuka said well: “There is nothing but confusion beneath us.” In those seven days one fact stood up gaunt and real as the remains of a bombed wall. The Russians admitted on the third day that they had lost 374 planes while they had shot down 381 German planes.

Set beside the usual fantastically onesided claims, that sentence told volumes.

The premise of victory in mechanized war is air superiority; it looked as if the Germans were getting it.

As the second week began, the German High Command released its long-promised catalogue of triumphs. Having built up a record of unswerving veracity as to geographical gains in six previous campaigns, the German official communiques were hard to disbelieve.

The Communiques were not, however, like any previous High Command announcement. They came from Adolf Hitler’s headquarters at the front and were obviously written by his fine, un-Italian hand. They were not only half political but full of bombast and they tried to demonstrate that the Russians had planned to pour their troops and their Bolshevism into Germany: “It is likely that, at the last minute, Middle Europe was spared an invasion, the consequences of which cannot be conceived. The German people truly are duty bound to give deepest thanks to its brave soldiers.” German figures of losses and gains, especially as to planes, had to be taken with a whole shaker of salt. But even salted down, they told a story of quite probable victory. The High Command admitted the loss of 150 planes, admitted in general “moderate losses” — instead of, as in all previous campaigns, “light” or “surprisingly small” losses. But it claimed to have put 4,107 Russian planes out of action, to have destroyed or captured 2,233 tanks, to have captured 40,000 men, to have taken 600 cannon and mountains of uncounted anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns, machine guns, rifles, various vehicles. The Russians admitted losing 850 planes, claimed 1,500 German planes.

Green Fields, Blue Sky. Terrain and season defined the campaign. The easiest area for attack was the central plain just above and below the vast Pripet Marshes. The two main German drives developed there — one headed for Minsk and Moscow, the other for Kiev and the Ukraine (see map) — over land flat as a billiard table, through fields still too green to be burned, under a sky clear enough for half-blind pilots. The weather would stay fine for three months, within which the Germans intended to attain their objectives.

The war’s most important offensive was aimed at Minsk, where the Russians had concentrated 24 of their best divisions. Steel columns shot out in the familiar pincers operation, only this time they moved far deeper and far wider than usual. Early this week the steel jaws bit together behind Minsk, and within the maw the Germans claimed to have two great armies; not only the Minsk divisions, but frontier divisions as well.

Below the Pripet Marshes, the offensive went more slowly, because before it could roll, the formidable frontier fortress of Przemysl had to be stormed. And near Luck the Russians offered up a Gargantuan tank battle.

Because the land ar<5und Finland is as pitted with water as Swiss cheese with air, because Russia is naturally defended from Rumania by the Prut and Dniester Rivers, Germany’s two stooges on the flanks did little. Finland toppled reluctantly into the war as German drives developed on Murmansk in the far north and on Lenin grad across the scarred Karelian Isthmus.

Rumanian forces, goaded on by German support, had trouble crossing the Prut, and Russia’s most successful counterthrust made its way across the Danube toward Constantsa. The Germans seemed to be gathering forces for a seaborne flanking movement on the Russian naval base of Odessa.

Weaknesses. But geography was not what the Germans were after. They were after the Russian Army. Their only objective was to divide the Army, subdivide it, chop it, grind it into broken little gobbets, so that all the Kremlin’s horses and all of its men would be unable to make it cohere again.

The first week saw that grinding process far along. Why were the Russians unable to prevent it? They had studied German tactics. They were brave. They were ready. Why were they incapable of keeping themselves intact?

Many factors weighed against them:

¶Their Air Force was untested in combat; it was probably outnumbered, since the Germans stripped other fronts to the aerial minimum. Russian airfields had apparently been placed too near the border.

¶Russian communications were miserable. Russian railways, which have to carry four-fifths as much traffic as American roads, have only one-fourth the trackage. Russian roads are so poor that railroads had to carry 84% of all traffic in 1937. These handicaps accentuated the traditional torpidity of Russian armed masses.

¶There was a fundamental confusion in the Russian system of defenses. Heaviest fixed defenses were behind the old Russian border—a system of defense-in-depth not as formidable as the Maginot Line. And yet large, heavy forces were concentrated in the buffer areas acquired by Russia since 1939. These front forces tried to stand, then tried to retire after the Germans had broken through, instead of fighting a quick rearguard action back to the areas where there was relatively concentrated defense.

¶Russian equipment was in most respects as good as German; but whereas some German units had one machine in ready reserve for every one in action and had expert technicians to service the machines of war, the Russians had slim reserves and inadequate provision for maintenance.

After several days of clanking, jolting action, this difference told.

The Pathetic Fallacy which gave the Russians—and most of the world—continuing hope was the Napoleonic parallel.

After so many people had clung to the World War I parallel on the French Front, until the Maginot Line was flanked and it was clear that this would be no war of position, it was strange that so many more clung to the even more antique Napoleonic parallel—the belief that by drawing the Germans forward into huge Russia, the defenders could let weather and distance defeat Adolf Hitler just as it had Napoleon Bonaparte.

Adolf Hitler’s Army is as light on its feet as a ballerina. Its supply system (airplane, truck, motorcycle sidecar) and its communications (uncoded wireless, telephoning as simply as calling up the girl friend) move like clockwork. While trying to withdraw before this system, any Army, and especially the sluggish, massive Red Army, would be bound to lose more than it hurt and would probably be demolished before it retreated enough hundreds of miles to tire out the attacker.

Besides, Adolf Hitler has heard of Napoleon. He certainly does not intend to go one tank-chug farther than he can take care of himself. His High Command have very obviously limited their sphere of operations; they intend to accomplish their mission of destruction before going the geographical limit.

The alternative to the tactics employed against Napoleon would be to stand on the defensive. The Russians did not seem to have decided last week whether to stand or fight backwards. But even to stand and try to fight in one place is not the better part of valor in Blitzkrieg. Modern war is like modern football—a thing of forward passes, mousetrap plays, end runs—and a seven-man-line power defense is no answer.

The only answer to modern offense is better modern offense, as the Germans so eloquently proved in their first defense in World War II in the Western Desert fortnight ago (TIME, June 30). The Germans have memorized and vitalized the fundamental theorem: “Attack is fire that advances, defense is fire that counter attacks.” The first power to defeat Adolf Hitler in the field will be the one which can shoot his planes out of the air and push him over backwards.