World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Triumph on the Dnieper

In Berlin, the Wehrmacht’s spokesman addressed the correspondents: “I am sorry I have to announce a Russian breakthrough on the German front.”

In these 14 words, the German Command last week admitted a grave defeat, the possibility of a graver disaster. The Dnieper line, on which Hitler had ordered his army to stand or die, was pierced. Now the Germans faced a long and costly retreat, the calamitous political echoes of defeat.

The Thrust. The break-through was the reward of a bold and ingenious strategy, backed up by a mounting superiority in men and weapons. Last week, for the first time, came the detailed story of how the Red blueprint was translated into victory.

When the Red Army launched its offensives against Kiev and Melitopol in September, the Wehrmacht rushed precious reserves of men and tanks to these points over strained and inadequate railroads and highways. The Russians saw their opportunity, struck between the two cities at the soft top of the Dnieper bulge (see map), won a small bridgehead below Kremenchug.

At the zero hour, Russian guns and bombers blasted German defenses. Into the gap poured Russian infantrymen and tanks, until then hidden in gullies and ravines. By the end of the second day, the forces of bald, hard-driving General Ivan Konev had opened a breach 28 miles wide, 16 miles deep, soon pushed the wedge southward at a fast pace. By this week, his army had driven some 70 miles into the bulge, was pounding on the gates of Krivoi Rog, an important rail and iron center. Outflanked, the German troops in Dniepropetrovsk abandoned the great city, with its wrecked power plants and factories, for a desperate flight southward. Over them roared Stormoviks, strafing and bombing.

Melitopol. Two weeks ago another force, under rotund and brilliant Colonel General Fedor Tolbukhin, increased pressure on Melitopol. Himself a veteran of Stalingrad, Tolbukhin had under him many a Stalingrad veteran—tough and fire-tested. To these men, fate seemed kind, for in Melitopol there were Germans they hated most: units of the Sixth Army, destroyed at Stalingrad and now resurrected with new blood; the Seventeenth Army, responsible for atrocities in the Caucasus.

The Germans fought well. Ordered to hold the city and its suburbs at any cost, they sprinkled the fields with pillboxes, fortified every house, battled with bayonets, knives, trench shovels. A blinding dust storm raged over the city. Sweating and cursing, the men fought and died by the thousands in hand combat, in shattered buildings, in tanks and self-propelled guns set afire by “Molotov cocktails.”

Last week, on the eleventh day of the siege, Melitopol fell. Said Moscow’s Izvestia: “Not one live German remains in the town. The dead ones can be counted by the thousands.” Before the city fell, Hitler reportedly trebled each officer’s pay, gave each soldier the Iron Cross. Stalin made the bravest of the victors Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Vistas. The victories of Konev and Tolbukhin opened up tempting vistas of strategy and tactics. With luck, the two armies could trap a quarter of a million German soldiers. But even if the Wehrmacht rescues its manpower, it will be compelled to retreat to the next line of defense on the Bug, only 85 miles from the Bessarabian border. It will have lost the Crimea and the heart of the Ukraine, with its wheat lands and its rich iron mines. It will have lost vast equipment and prestige. Such a retreat might well provoke an upheaval in the Balkans.

Many “ifs” still face the Red Army. Capricious weather, German counterattacks, overstrained lines of supply, a costly tactical error—each could affect the course of the battle. But with each day the poison of retreat was weakening the Wehrmacht; with each day the contour of Russian victory was growing sharper.

This week General Tolbukhin’s mechanized units were already streaking across the flatlands and the southern Ukraine. Their objective was the narrow Perekop bottleneck through which the Germans were fleeing from the Crimea. If Perekop’s one single-track railway could be cut, the enemy would have no choice but to attempt a perilous sea evacuation.

General Konev’s columns were racing southward, in an effort to seal the route of retreat from the Dnieper bulge. Farther north, the Red Army was developing other offensives: above and below Kiev, near Gomel, east of Vitebsk.

Berlin Worries. The Germans foresaw catastrophe. A Swedish correspondent in Berlin reported last week that the day General Konev’s break-through was announced was Germany’s “blackest day since the war started, even counting Stalingrad.” Said Germany’s well-known military analyst, General Kurt Diettmar:

“We cannot deny that the Eastern Front has disappointed us. . . . We cannot say yet that we have overcome the critical stage of this gigantic battle. It is painful to note that our marvelous soldiers have been fighting so bravely without any outward success. . . . We must not lose heart.”