World Battlefronts: EASTERN FRONT: The Final Flood

The huge flood of Russian might along the Oder and Neisse Rivers, fronting Berlin and Dresden, began to rise this week. The dikes crumpled first in the plains northeast of Berlin. Marshal Georgi Zhukov’s forces, behind a tremendous predawn artillery shoot and attacks by swarms of bombers, broke into the Schwedt area below Stettin and set up a new Oder bridgehead 45 miles northeast of Berlin.

But this was only a beginning. The Germans, who seemed to want to speed the last few minutes before the hour of doom in the north, told of the Russian strokes. One had breached the German lines only 24 miles from Berlin. Another had won the Seelow heights west of Küstrin. A great concentration of Cossack horsemen and tankmen was ready to gallop and clatter upon Berlin. An order of the day issued over Adolf Hitler’s name shrilled that this was the last great attack.

There was little doubt that the Red Army was ready to unloose the flood all along the Stettin-Dresden front. And there was no doubt of the outcome as the Russians pushed toward the Americans—at some points less than 80 miles away.

Four Armies. Marshal Zhukov probably had more than 1,000,000 men massed before the Berlin sector. To the north were some 500,000 more—the armies of Marshals Alexander M. Vasilevsky and Konstantin K. Rokossovsky. which had flattened the East Prussia and Pomerania pockets. To the south, Marshal Ivan S. Konev’s big First Ukrainian Army was launched to hurl itself toward Dresden. Against all this massive weight was the largest force the shredded Wehrmacht could muster: perhaps 900,000 men in formidable defense positions. But greater German forces had failed to stop the Red Army when its full weight was catapulted into action.

The battles in north and central Germany would be struggles of annihilation. Ruined Berlin mattered little now as a military prize. The Russians this week already had a prize probably more significant to final victory: Vienna. There the siege which might have destroyed much of the city had been quickly turned into a Nazi rout. The street battles of seven days & nights were the last phases of a strategic victory that had been won in four weeks of battles along the roads from Budapest. In those battles the Germans had desperately spent armor and manpower. The Red Army had chopped apart eleven armored divisions.

Vienna, main rail hub of southeastern Europe, was the gateway between the food bins and arsenals of Czechoslovakia and the 35 divisions in Italy and Yugoslavia. Even before Moscow’s 324-gun salute boomed the Vienna victory, the Russians were off toward more decisive prizes. This week Red columns stood only 30 miles from Brünn, one of the shrinking Reich’s last armaments centers. Other columns had turned westward along the Danube and toward Linz. There the Russians would be in position to seal off the eastern side of the Nazis’ Alpine redoubt.

The Russians forced a bitter pill down Nazi throats at another last-stand redoubt: Königsberg, ancient citadel of Prussian militarism. There, in the 69th day of siege, General of Infantry Lasch surrendered when Red Tommy-gunners stormed the old castle’s battlements. Nazi leaders raged at the surrender, tried the fortress commander in absentia. Said the German communiqué: “General Lasch was sentenced … to death by hanging. His kin will be held responsible.”