Eleventh Week

The Red Army has exploded the myth of German invincibility and shattered the illusion of the Blitzkrieg. The mad Fascist beast is bleeding profusely.

--Moscow Red Star

Last week World War II began its third year. This week the Russo-German War began its eleventh week. At the outset military experts sold the Red Army short.

For the Red Army to try to slug toe-to-toe with the Wehrmacht, said they, would be fatal. The Red Army would be annihilated within three months. Last week the Red Army was still only partly annihilated, and the rest of it was still slugging. Even Berlin reported its resistance "unbelievable," spoke with hurt surprise of new Russian opposition. On three colossal fronts the Red Army was not only taking punishment but giving it.

North. Although they lost Viipuri on the Karelian Isthmus to the Finns last week and were driven out of Tallinn in Estonia by the Germans, the Russians still held Leningrad and denied that the railroad to Moscow had been cut as Berlin claimed. In modern war the taking of a large city is a tough and costly job if its citizenry is as determined on a last-ditch defense as was, for instance, the citizenry of Madrid. It is more than likely that there is plenty of this spirit in Leningrad. Last week a bulletin from there declared:

Chistov, a factory worker, is mastering the art of sniping; Michurin, a lathe operator, has mastered the heavy machine gun and can riddle stationary or moving targets by day or night; Afinogenov, a bookkeeper, can toss a hand grenade 40 yards. Workmen of the Savin factory practice bayonet drills every day after hours. Bernadsky, a professor at the Herzen Institute, practices with rifle and hand grenade along with the rest of the staff. In the textile mills, Weaver Nikitina, Spinner Vasileyeva, Winder Zhdanova and Piecer Isayeva are busy teaching their fellow workers first aid.

At week's end, despite denials from Helsinki and Berlin, Uncle Joe Stalin appeared to be trying to maneuver Finland out of the war. He withdrew 15 divisions from the Karelian Isthmus. Having recaptured Viipuri, which the Russians took from them in 1940, the Finns, by the Russians' withdrawal, will now have virtually all their pre-1940 territory back again. Stalin evidently hoped that the Finns, anxious to retain the friendship of the U.S. and embarrassed by their alliance with Hitler, might now pile arms and pull out of the campaign.

Center. Over boggy terrain in the Gomel area, Lieut. General Ivan Stepanovich Konev hurled pistonlike counterattacks. Russians claimed they had stopped the Nazi drive on Moscow in its tracks. The Nazis acknowledged that Russian "new armies" had made heavy counter assaults, but insisted they had been smothered. The Red Air Force announced a bag of 500 planes for the week ending Aug. 27.

South. Bogey-mustachioed Marshal Semion Budenny had got most of his Army out of the Nazi trap in the Ukraine and escaped to the Dnieper's east bank. Early in the week the Reds reported the death of snake-eyed Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, German commander on the Ukraine front, but by week's end the Field Marshal was back merrily trying to set the Russian Marshal's whiskers on fire. Russians officially reported the blowing up of the $110,000,000 Dnieper Dam near Zaporozhe which the late, great U.S. engineer Colonel Hugh Lincoln Cooper built. Reported but not admitted was the capture of Dniepropetrovsk, a city of 500,000 which produced a large proportion of the Soviet Union's iron and steel.

Little Warriors. On all fronts there was guerrilla activity. Sample: "A group of Nazi armored cars were brought to a halt on a side road, but it proved impossible to rout the crews with rifle fire. One fighter in the guerrilla group crept close, dragging three sheaves of wheat. Suddenly rising he shouted: 'The robbers wanted our bread. Let's give it to them!' and hurled the wheat against one of the Nazi cars, following it with a flaming bottle of gasoline. The wheat blazed up and quickly converted the Nazi car into a pile of blackened iron."

Despite Russia's agony, the war had its lighter moments:

> In Kiev the citizenry took daily 15-kopeck streetcar excursions to the front to see the Germans.

> In Odessa, where the citizens are under siege, a unit of Black Sea sailors appeared in the streets singing, fittingly enough, the Sailors' Dance by Reinhold Moritzovich Gliere. The populace immediately threw a monster block party.

> Pamphlets were dropped over the German lines containing passes through the Russian lines for anybody who cared to desert.

> The Russians released a picture of a captured Nazi aviator. The caption described him as "making an unsuccessful attempt to flee, cowardly tearing down his officer's shoulder straps. . . ."

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