The People's Avengers

Guerrillas, men and women: Honor and glory to you--heroes of the people's war against the German occupants! Long live the people's avengers--the valiant Soviet guerrillas, men and women!

This tribute was high on the list of 37 slogans distributed by Tass. Soviet news agency, to commemorate the Red Army's 24th anniversary (TIME, March 2). Last week came proof that the tribute was more than earned. In a maneuver encircling the Sixteenth German Army at Staraya Russa, 140 miles south of still-besieged Leningrad, Soviet troops were guided by a guerrilla named Ivan Grozny, who is known as "Ivan the Terrible." Guerrilla Grozny and his guerrillas cut communications, uprooted German mine fields, finally marched 25 miles through bitter cold and deep snow to help encircle the Germans.

The result of this maneuver was in doubt at week's end (the German High Command called the report of the encirclement "plain nonsense"). Elsewhere the Red Army's anniversary push met stiffening resistance. A second Russian pincer, laid around Dorogobuzh in the central sector, had so far failed to close on another Nazi Army. In "a southern sector" Russia conceded a German wedge of 24 square miles into the Russian line.

Seventy-five miles southwest of Moscow, New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Walter Kerr talked with several guerrilla leaders. They told him that partisan warfare is literally to the death: the partisans take no prisoners, expect death themselves if captured. So impressed are the Germans that rewards of 10,000 rubles (about $1,900) are paid for captured guerrilla leaders, 5,000 each for their followers. Wrote Walter Kerr:

"They are average men, with some women, their ages varying from 16 years to 55 and even 60. . . . Leonid Baidek . . . is a thin, seemingly nervous type of fellow, but a man who knows the countryside. . . . His wife and his wife's sister were killed by the Germans because they found out that he was a partisan. . . . There were 33 men in Baidek's detachment, ununiformed, heavily armed and determined, roaming over the entire region between Bryansk, Orel and Tula, blowing up bridges, hunting down small groups of Germans, smashing trucks and ambushing artillery. . . . In one operation they freed 200 Russian prisoners. ... Of these 33 guerrillas, 19 survived, seven disappeared, four were killed in battle and three were hanged by the Germans."

A weekend dispatch from Leningrad translated partisan successes during six months of hard war into hard facts: 10,480 Germans (including two generals) killed, 64 trains wrecked, five railway bridges dynamited, 71 planes destroyed, a "heavy toll" taken of German tanks and automobiles.

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