World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Dead Men’s Tale

A million dead men heaped the battlefields of southern Russia. Millions more were maimed, captured or missing. Verdun had gulped 738,000 Frenchmen and Germans in 299 days, but Verdun was a lesser horror. Not until long after the war, if ever, would the full losses be known. Russia acknowledged that 606,000 men had been lost in three months and declared that 480,000 Germans had been slain. Germany gave no hint of its own losses, but claimed 1,044,741 Russian soldiers had been captured since spring, raising to five million men their total claims of Russian captives.

At such a cost had Marshal von Bock thrust into the Caucasus and heaved his tank-bristling lines to the Don bend where, with seemingly inexhaustible waves of men and weapons, he was making his greatest bid for a breakthrough to Stalingrad and the Volga. At such a cost had Marshal Timoshenko kept his Red Army virtually intact, with supply lines still open to the Caucasus oilfields and munitions centers to the east. Whether the awful costs had been worth it to either, whether they could afford such expenditure of human life and weapons would be tallied only after the battle was decided.

Certainly the onrushing waves of Germans indicated that Bock was still able to be prodigal in his attempt to cut the Volga, to push the Red Army back into Asia, to leave it a weakened mass incapable of engaging the full German military might. If that were accomplished on the southern front, Bock could consider his forces well spent. Then, if an offensive in the north were to close the Arctic ports, Russia would indeed be cut off from her Allies; the Red Army, starved for sufficient supplies, would no longer be an immediate threat to Germanized Europe.

In the Don bend the struggle reached a crisis. For three weeks the Germans had inched forward, slowly cleaning out the last Russian resistance west of the river. Now they had bridgeheads across the Don where it crooks within 47 miles of Stalingrad. Two new footholds were won, the sprouting prongs of a pincer designed to squeeze off the lower Volga’s key industrial city. One prong thrust northeast from Kotelnikov in great force, the other southeast from Kletskaya, in relentless progress that the Red Army was unable to halt.

Well to the north, fighting was renewed in the Voronezh sector, but with force insufficient to divert German pressure from Stalingrad. To the south, Krasnodar fell and the Germans swept deeper into the Caucasus.

The Russians could find a few hopeful signs. Red Star, the army organ, said the Germans were no longer able to pull up powerful reserves, as they had last July; Red Star cracked that the Wehrmacht now advances only in ryvok (jerks). “German losses in the last three months,” said the paper, “are slowly but continually laying the basis for inevitable destruction of the Nazi Army.”

Even though such optimism was unquenched, the Russian people were repeating a proverb that might fit the dark days still ahead: “Now we see flowers, but later they will turn to seeds.”

No More Talk

> A young artillery captain, on leave from the Kalinin front, said: “This is not the time for talking. This is the time for fighting.”

> Pravda printed a bitter cartoon entitled “Atlantic Coast,” showing a dummy German with a gramophone attached to it, shouting: “Our fortifications are impregnable.”

> George Alexandrov, propaganda chief of the Communist Party, wrote that it was up to the Red Army alone to save Russia. He did not mention a second front.

> Russians read the first copies of a new paper, British Ally, published by Britain and noted its quotation from Churchill’s valiant speech of June 22, 1941: “The cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free people … in every quarter of the globe.” The Russians were not impressed.