World Battlefronts: Victory and Blood

In the murky dawn hour when Kiev fell, the battle for the Dnieper had virtually ended, the battle for western Russia had begun.

If proof of the vast turn in the Russian war were needed, Moscow provided it last week with an official map of the summer and fall gains. Last April, the Red Army published a map showing the gains of the previous winter. On the western fringe of that map lay Odessa, Kiev, Mogilev, Vitebsk—all still deep in the enemy’s rear. On the western fringe of the map published in Moscow newspapers last week lay Bucharest, Warsaw, Konigsberg in East Prussia.

The New Phase of the war had begun auspiciously. West of Kiev, mobile Soviet columns spread out for 45 miles like the tentacles of a huge octopus, seizing vast booty, disorganizing German resistance. Moscow’s Pravda quoted Nazi prisoners: “The swiftness of events defies description.”

South of Kiev:

> After a 130-mile dash in twelve days, Russian guns were shelling the city of Kherson from emplacements across the Dnieper.

> After a hard battle, two beachheads were won near Kerch. Cut off from all land routes of escape, the German garrison in the Crimea was now being slowly compressed.

> At Krivoi Rog, the Wehrmacht continued its desperate, costly—and thus far successful—struggle to keep open an escape corridor for the forces still within the Dnieper bend.

North of Kiev:

> In the Nevel sector, which looks like a dagger aimed at the Baltic States and northern Poland, there was fierce action again, and the Germans acknowledged a “major penetration” of their lines. West of Nevel some Russian columns were now within 50 miles of the Latvian, 40-odd miles of the Polish border. Gomel still faced doom and Red troops were barely a dozen miles from German held Vitebsk.

Vistas. Though the Germans had not yet admitted it, Hitler’s vaunted Dnieper line (“Here I am and here I shall remain”) was no more. From a point just below doomed Gomel, 550 miles down to the Black Sea, the Dnieper’s left bank was virtually clear of the foe.

The Red Army had thus ended what was probably the toughest part of the offensive begun at Stalingrad a year ago. It had beaten the Wehrmacht in its prime, vaulted over two great river barriers (Donets, Dnieper), captured the strongest of the enemy’s strongholds (Rostov, Kharkov, Orel, Bryansk, Smolensk, Melitopol, Kiev).

The Wehrmacht was still strong, but it was now a cornered, wounded panther, no longer able to mount an offensive on the eastern front. It could still seek refuge behind the Bug or the Dniester, but neither was an obstacle as tough as the Dnieper, and both were frighteningly close to the borders of German Europe.

From Kiev, General Vatutin’s army could now plunge directly west into Poland, only 130 miles away. Or it could swerve southwest, to try to set yet another trap for the German forces in the southern Ukraine. The weather in the south was still favorable, the troops fresh, supply lines from the east presumably restored in the past six weeks.

Blood & Steel. But it had taken Rus sian lives and steel to alter the maps, to change the goals. Both Moscow and Berlin last week totaled up the cost to each other of the summer and fall offensive, came out with incredible but nevertheless significant figures :

Russians said German lost Germans said Russians lost Killed 900,000 1,300,000 Wounded 1,702,000 1,570,000 Prisoners 98,000 130,000 Planes 9,900 10,200 Guns 13,000 9,529 Machine guns 50,000 14,499

If these figures proved nothing else, they did indicate the terrific scale of the fighting and the losses on both sides. When the people of Moscow went into the streets on Nov. 7 to celebrate the 26th anniversary of the revolution, their hearts were glad with victory. But they were also heavy with sorrow. For few Russian families had not sacrificed lives to keep their country free.