Hitler's Borodino

Before he stood in the courtyard of the Kremlin, watching Moscow and his hopes go up in flames, Napoleon Bonaparte had lost three-quarters of his Army in the weary march from the Russian border and in the costly Battle of Borodino, just before Moscow.

This week, the fifth of Adolf Hitler's invasion, the new conqueror, having won the battle of the border, was heavily engaged in his battle for Moscow.

Napoleon won at Borodino, but not without heavy losses. It looked as if Hitler's battle for Moscow might be the same story, writ large.

"The Russians showed the utmost tenacity," wrote Napoleon's General Armand de Caulaincourt, as any D.N.B. reporter might have this week. "Their ranks did not break; pounded by the artillery, sabered by the cavalry, forced back at the bayonet-point by our infantry, their somewhat immobile masses met death bravely, and only gave way slowly before the fury of our attacks. . . . Several times he [Napoleon] said to . . . me: 'These Russians let themselves be killed like automatons . . . this does not help us at all.' "

This same phenomenon did not help Adolf Hitler either. And Hitler's stakes were incomparably greater. At Borodino the line of battle was two miles long; this week it was 3,000 miles long. At Borodino 250,000 men were engaged; this week several million men were fighting.

On the Fronts. Hitler's battle for Moscow had its focus at Smolensk. He had broken through the Stalin Line at the gap near Smolensk--the open space between the defending Dnieper and Dvina Rivers, north of Orsha (see map, p. 16). Through the gap the usual spearhead poured and for the first time Moscow itself was a Luftwaffe target. In a five and a half hour night attack, 200 planes planted big explosions near the Kremlin, said Berlin. But the Russians declared that only "isolated" raiders got through, called the attempt a "failure."

On the northern front the Russians fared better. The attack on Leningrad--which the Germans persisted in calling by the Tsarist name, St. Petersburg--developed as a sneak around two lakes: Ladoga on the Finnish side, Peipus on the Estonian. The Finns, said a German reporter, fought so fanatically that they had to be restrained; but the Russians fought hard too. One German reporter described "bandits" on this front who fought with axes, daggers, broken bottles and adzes.

Farther south the Germans, who were on the threshold of Kiev as the week began and had not gone in as it ended, complained of bad weather, of fortifications "as strong as the Maginot Line," of forts three stories deep. But as British Military Expert Strategicus wrote last week: "It is not positions which defend the troops but the troops who defend the positions." On the Ukraine front the Germans finally forced their way across the Dniester River, the boundary line until the Russians took Bessarabia in June 1940.

The German advance, which previously had averaged 22 miles a day, slowed last week to eight miles a day, in the face of grim Russian resistance, bad weather and perhaps the growing difficulty of operating over the vast, unfurnished Russian countryside.

No one knew how much was left of the Russian Air Force -- the Germans had claimed to have destroyed some 8,000 planes -- but apparently some of it still functioned, though mostly at night. The Berlin radio spoke of "ceaseless mass raids such as we have never experienced before."

"Struggle Against Cowards." The greatest piece of news the Germans had all week was issued by Comrade Stalin. He announced that he himself would take over from Marshal Semion Timoshenko the post of Commissar for Defense -- i.e., Commander in Chief. The office of political commissar in the Army was reinstated.

This was good news for the Nazis.

When the Red Army was originally founded, there were not enough politically reliable officers to go around; Tsarist officers had to be kept in service. To guard against counter-revolutionary movements within the Army, they were rigidly supervised by political officers. Every military order issued by an officer had to be counter-signed by his commissar before it could be carried out. In practice this came to mean constant civilian interference, and endless argument instead of action in crisis.

The purge of Marshal Mikhail Tukachevsky was partly caused by his objection to the revival of the powers of political commissars. The Finnish war, after Marshal Tukachevsky and 213 other officers had been liquidated, showed that they were right. Commissars were dismissed and the Soviet Army organ, Red Star, declared: "War does not tolerate dilettantism. . . . The great Stalin urges us to face reality and not lock ourselves in shells of ossified dogma. . . . The discipline of the Red Army must be stronger, sterner, and more exacting." Marshal Timoshenko told his officers: "Teach your troops only what is necessary for war and only in the way it is done in war."

Last week it appeared that Joseph V. Stalin believed that the Russian Army could not possibly have been forced back two-thirds of the way to Moscow unless there were traitors among its officers. So once more he instituted political commissars to fight a "ruthless struggle against all cowards, panic-mongers and deserters." Henceforth, Russian officers would have politicians as well as Germans to contend with.

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