World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Center of Gravity

Stalingrad was no longer a city. It was a place on the Volga, an expanse of rubbled homes and buildings, heaping corpses, tanks. The battle for Stalingrad was no longer a battle for that place alone. The Russians, widening their counter-attacks above and below the site where Stalin’s city once stood, now saw the struggle on the Volga “as the center of gravity of the summer campaign.” Stalingrad, they said, was no longer a separate segment of the Volga line, but a part of “general combat” from Leningrad to the Caucasus.

Dispatches to Moscow newspapers reported more gains than setbacks. But the official communiqués were rigidly cautious, almost foreboding in their restraint as the battle entered its seventh week. Slowly, at terrible cost, the Germans were closing upon the center of gravity.

Farther south the news was similar. In the Caucasus the Russians halted the Germans here & there, wiped out 8.000 Rumanians in one battle below Novorossiisk, but in the end had to report slight Nazi advances down the Black Sea coast and toward the Grozny oil fields.

If the Russians were cautious and apprehensive, the German propagandists were definitely unhappy. Having announced the imminent fall of Stalingrad in early September, they did not know what to say last week. So they said less and less. Into their broadcasts crept a familiar note of uncertainty, evasion, desperation. It was the same note which so shook the morale of the German people last year, warning them that their victories of the summer and fall were not victory over the Red Army and Russia.