Death on the Approaches

(See Cover)

When the Germans launched their second supposedly final attack on Moscow a fortnight ago Berlin military spokesmen called it a "do-or-die" drive. It was planned and commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who because he loves to lecture his men on the glory of dying for the Fatherland, is called der Sterber (the Dier). By this week many a German had died before Moscow, and the Dier was still doing. But the city still stood.

To Marshal von Bock, losses do not greatly matter; certainly they do not matter as much as final success.

Fedor von Bock may eventually succeed in taking Moscow. But this week it appeared that he would have to make at least one more try before he even surrounded the city. Subduing it would be still another matter.

Russians, growing confident on their first major successes, began to say that if Moscow held out a few weeks longer, the turning point of the whole war against Germany would have been reached.

The approaches to Moscow make a first-class military cemetery. The land is mostly flat, some of it gently rolling. To the northwest there are numerous swamps, now partly frozen. To the north there are great, patchy forests, which even in winter are good cover because they consist mostly of pine and spruce. All around is a net work of rivers--Volga, Moskva, Oka, Sherna, Protva, Ugra, Ruza, Yauza--which are now mostly frozen.

This terrain is decorated with superb internal communications, which favor the defender. Moscow is the focus of ten radiating railroads, and even though the Germans have cut six of those roads, the stumps are still available for throwing troops into this or that sector of the front. There are, besides, eleven trunk highways and numberless small roads running north, west and south from the city. Moscow teems with busses, trucks and cars available for urgent transport.

Polka-dotting this area is a formidable system of prepared defenses. There are no Russian lines, as such, before Moscow. The fortifications are in depth, and they run from the present line of action right to the city. They consist of everything from tiny land mines to monstrous forts three stories deep.

The city is itself a super-deathtrap. Big cities, and especially capital cities, are the index of a defender's ferocity. Madrid showed for 30 months that the Loyalists meant business. Warsaw was Poland's small core of guts. Oslo was the keyhole of Norway, and in it the key turned pretty easily. Paris fell without a whimper, and so, soon afterward, did France. The Germans threatened last week, 32 weeks after Yugoslavia was supposedly licked, to flatten Belgrade. Of all the capitals, Moscow looms as the most formidable.

It is huge: it covers 117 square miles. It is a maze of irregularly traced, winding streets. It is remarkably self-sufficient. Its industry, 14% of all Russia's, is doing all it can for defense. Its water supply is so far safe: the great Uchinsk Reservoir, 16 miles north of the city, the older Mytischi mineral springs system, ten miles northeast, and the Rublievo river-water system, ten miles west, are all still out of the enemy's reach. Its sources of electrical power lie farther afield, but they are well scattered and, so far, only slightly hampered.

But Moscow's greatest death-dealing weapon is its life.

The people of the Moscow area number more than 8,000,000. They constitute an unprecedented labor army, which can be, and has been, rushed to every threatened sector, there to construct cement fortlets, dig bunkers, repair breaches and sow mines as prodigally as wheat.

Muscovites are human; they are acquainted with fear. But they and the regular Army around them are just as determined as the defenders of Leningrad, and all are apt to pay heed to the command which their Government gave them last week:

"To retreat one more step is a crime none shall forgive. Stop the enemy. Beat him out of his positions. This is an order which is not to be broken."

The equipment against which Marshal von Bock stakes his men's lives is, for the outside world, incapable of measurement. But this much is certain: the Russians, relying on promises made by U.S. and British missions to Moscow, are not stinting. They are throwing everything into the fight. This is a great gamble, can pay off only if the democracies really deliver.

Russia's most immediate need is for tanks. The Beaverbrook-Harriman mission was pressed for quick delivery of tanks above all, even if it meant sacrificing planes. Of airplanes, Russia needs heavy bombers most. Machine tools, unfortunately the rarest and most complicated gadgets, are badly needed. Russia asked the U.S. for more than 30,000 tons of steel a month, especially for 5,000 tons a month of rare superhard tool steel;* for between 5,000 and 10,000 tons a month of aluminum; considerable quantities of nickel. The U.S. had to turn down a request for magnesium. Britain was asked for large supplies of rubber and jute.

That the democracies may deliver was twice hinted last week. From Bandar Shahpur on the Persian Gulf came pictures of a ship landing goods bearing U.S. labels. The Russians announced that the first shipment of British tanks had gone into action on the Moscow front. The tanks were painted white, as camouflage against the snow.

The weather which required this camouflage was steadily worsening. According to almanac reckoning, winter officially began in the Moscow area last week. Until mid-April the ground will now be under a blanket of snow, the earth helpfully hard. To Marshal von Bock's men winter will be grim, but not deadly. The average temperature for January, the coldest month, is 14DEG F.

In the winter of 1812 Napoleon retreated from Moscow, but in the winter of 1941 Fedor von Bock expects to take the city. This is partly because Fedor von Bock is driven by a furious determination shared by every German officer all the way up to Adolf Hitler; it is partly because der Sterber is disdainful of hard ships.

Holy Fire of Kuestrin. Fedor von Bock looks like a man dying of some mysterious internal combustion. He is gaunt, and his eyes have the baleful stare of windows in a bombed-out house. He is a competent general--in Russia he has been Germany's best--and besides, he believes, with aggressive religiousness, in dying if necessary for the soil and honor of Prussia.

Fedor was son of a major general, grandson of a general. He was born 61 years ago in ancient Kuestrin, where Frederick the Great was imprisoned by his father so that he would learn "the meaning of Prussianism." At cadet schools young Fedor showed by his unbreakable spirit that he already understood something of that meaning. By 1910 he had talked his way into the right to wear red stripes down his trouser legs--the badge of a general staffer. He had begun making speeches with the refrain: "Our profession should always be crowned by a heroic death for the Emperor and the Fatherland."

In Fedor von Bock's cosmos, the Fatherland remained constantly deathworthy; the Emperor was interchangeable with, successively, Weimar Republicanism, Hindenburg, the Fuehrer. He was completely unpolitical: he never plotted, was never purged.

He always satisfied his superiors, often was the butt of his contemporaries. They used to goad him at mess by suggesting that an enemy bullet was not something to be grateful for. This would enrage Bock and he would make his usual harangue, until his fellows all said together: "Ah, the holy fire of Kuestrin."

But as Fedor von Bock worked his way up, he won more & more respect--both for his fanaticism and for his thoroughness. Soon his fanaticism spread in the Army, until every unit had a handful of "Bock's own dying heroes."

When war came, he gave plenty of soldiers the fatal chance. He was not one to hoard lives. In Poland he had to do more fighting than General Gerd von Rundstedt, but by losing far more men he went just as fast. In France, too, his central armies of Group B suffered relatively high casualties. In Russia he won Germany's greatest victories (Bialystok-Minsk, Smolensk, Bryansk-Vyazma) and suffered the greatest losses. Last week he was still sending men to glorious, spendthrift death.

Steely determination to win and a willingness to die have won more than one battle. But when these qualities develop into indifference to losses--as they did on the Western Front in World War I and as they did in Napoleon's later campaigns--they can easily lose wars. Before Moscow Bock is expending men and materiel whose strength Germany will never be able to call on again. It is just possible that when the military history of World War II is written and a list is made of the generals who have done most to whittle down Germany's chances of victory, the name of Bock may lead all the rest.

Scrabbling. His greatest efforts were flung at Moscow's flanks (see map, p. 24). Starting from a line (Nov. 17), the strongest previous blows of which had been struck directly opposite Moscow, he skirted south of the hard core of resistance at Tula to drive straight east as far as Skopin; then cut south of another hard core at Kalinin to drive east to Dmitrov. His intention seemed to be to develop a huge encirclement of the capital.

But advance through Moscow's terrain of swamps, forests, rivers, and especially of forts-in-depth could not possibly be a Blitz advance. It was a slow, painful, scrabbling process.

Because Marshal von Bock could not advance speedily, the element of surprise was largely denied him. The usually ponderous Russians could see what he was trying to do, were able to take counter-measures (see black arrows on map, p. 24). They claimed that they were squeezing his northern prong into a virtual encirclement, that they were slowing the southern prong.

This week Marshal von Bock's second great try seemed to be playing out. But the tenacious Marshal was not through. He would certainly try, try again. If he eventually succeeded, it would be at great cost, because the Dier would go on saying to his men, as he had always said:

"The ideal soldier fulfills his duty to the utmost, obeys without even thinking, thinks only when ordered to do so, and has as his only desire to die the honorable death of a soldier killed in action."

*Here they were asking for a piece of the moon. Last year the U.S. produced 120,000 tons of tool steel; 5,000 tons a month would be half of U.S. production at a time when the U.S. is also tooling up.

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