End and Beginning

On the Russian front, farther north every day, the snow melted from the faces of the winter dead. All around them, Nazi and Communist, the world's greatest battle still flared. Living men had taken their places, in untold thousands. They fought savagely, as though each tomorrow would bring victory.

Savage as the fighting was and had been, it would soon out-savage all that had gone before. All along the 1,200-mile front, the certain threat of a new and deadlier battle, to begin with the drying of the ground, hung like the storm cloud of a hurricane's second and deadliest phase. Against its break, Russians slashed deep into Nazi positions. Nazis hung grimly to what they had been ordered to hold.

It was the opposition of two tactics, the lancing technique of the Russians and the strongpoint system of the Germans, that kept the front from knitting itself into the stabilized warfare of 1915-18 in France. From Leningrad, newly freed from the German, to Taganrog, there were at least ten separate pockets of German resistance, stoutly held (see map). The Russians surged between and around them, in great pincers. But the pincers were hard to close. The Germans held on & on.

The Russians still talked hopefully of knocking off the pocket of Staraya Russa, of taking Kharkov, richest military prize of all. They still might. But progress was agonizingly slow. And losses on both sides were heavy. In any well-regulated old-fashioned war the front would long since have dropped into hibernation, while both sides girded themselves for the spring.

This time, while fighting went on, both sides prepared for the greater battle without sparing their front-line troops. Equipment still poured up to the fronts, especially airplanes (including American-made Bell Airacobra fighters for the Russians). Men were shuttled back & forth, to be thrown in where the going was hot. And behind the lines new armies of bright-faced youngsters, who had never seen war, were being trained.

Some military experts estimated that the Germans would have on the front 250 divisions--around 5,000,000 men--when the weather opened up, that they would include at least 25 Panzer divisions. The Russians announced that Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov was ready with his spring troops, in "tens of divisions." From Ankara came more definite figures on Voroshilov's strength: 75 infantry divisions, 20 tank divisions, twelve motorized, 15 cavalry. Added to what Russia already had on the front, they would probably outnumber anything Germany could muster.

Back of the line Russia had some of her best military brains at work. So had Germany. Adolf Hitler had pigeon-holed his intuition and called back his Marshals. Walther von Brauchitsch was in conference with him and ready to go back into service. So were Bock, Rundstedt and desert-fighter Erwin Rommel, called home from Africa to confer on the synchronization of Germany's Russian and Near Eastern drives. While the new battles were planned, the old battle went on. And all along the front, in windrows, lay the sightless dead.

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