World: Armies of the Forest

In peacetime Russia. Peter and Elena Ignatov led a quiet, homey life. But the war altered all that. Killing has become their trade; they pursue it with the matter-of-factness with which Peter once tinkered with engines and Elena mended her sons’ torn garments. Today, Peter’s is one of Russia’s busiest guerrilla “armies”; Elena is one of his killers.

Their exploits have made them national figures. Pravda honored the Ignatovs in an editorial. The same issue announced that seven partisans had been made Heroes of the Soviet Union. Two of the seven were Peter’s sons: they had died blowing up a Nazi ammunition train.

War of Stealth. No gun salvos in Moscow record the guerrilla’s exploits: they are small victories, pinpricks in a war of titans. But enough pinpricks can bleed, exhaust, inflict painful wounds. Last week, a Soviet communiqué recorded these pinpricks :

“In the Cherkassy direction our troops . . . together with guerrillas . . . struck an unexpected blow. . . . In October several guerrilla detachments in the Tarnopol region blew up 33 enemy troop trains, two armored trains and a railway bridge. . . . At the beginning of November the Germans sent out a large punitive expedition against one of the guerrilla detachments. In a two-day engagement the Soviet patriots wiped out more than 100 enemy officers and men and forced the enemy to retreat.”

When the Wehrmacht retreats, the partisans retreat with it—harassing, dynamiting, killing, raiding villages and towns, ambushing supply columns, cutting telegraph lines. This war of stealth is not entirely haphazard; a thoroughly organized Central Staff of the Partisan Movement coordinates attack, and keeps in touch with the many “armies,” partly by courier and partly by radio. But of necessity the control is loose, and the guerrilla leaders usually choose their own tactics, make their own decisions.

No one but the Central Staff knows the total guerrilla strength, but it must run into hundreds of thousands. In the Army of the Bryansk Forest alone, 3,200 men and women won guerrilla and Red Army decorations. Other “Armies of the Forest” —between Kiev and Zhitomir (see map), in the Pripet Marshes, in White Russia and the Crimean Peninsula—are as big, or bigger.

Complex Foe. Most of the Partisans today fight with captured rifles, hand grenades, machine guns. The larger units employ German-made artillery and tanks. Scarce items—medicines, winter clothes, shoes—are supplied by Red Army planes and parachutes. An air shuttle service flies doctors and Army officers into guerrilla territory, flies the wounded out. The bigger “armies” operate their own bakeries, hospitals, community bathhouses. Many mimeograph and distribute their own newspapers.

The Wehrmacht has burned down forests where guerrillas lurked. It has razed villages, killed or imprisoned thousands of suspects, created special antiguerilla forces (in one case 60.000 strong), offered big rewards (for the head of Guerrilla Chief Mikhail Romashkin: 15,000 rubles, a house, 32 acres of land, two cows, a horse). But the hour came when the Wehrmacht’s mouthpiece, Lieut. General Kurt Diettmar, had to make an admission: “The struggle with the partisans has become a complex problem, which cannot be solved by small means.”