Thrust from the Sea

North of the Arctic Circle the winter-bitten Germans coiled sluggishly to strike. Russian intelligence learned from prisoners and from their own aviators that the Nazis were preparing an offensive against Murmansk, on the Barents Sea end of one tube through which Britain and the U.S. feed supplies to Russia.

Out into the Barents Sea, where Russian submarines had reported sinking several Nazi transports, the Russians set off in warships crowded with soldiers in ponderous winter clothing. They wheeled wide around the German left flank on the shore, then steamed in and landed their fighting men.

With a beachhead in the Germans' rear, the Russians plunged into their supply lines, slashing right & left. The Germans began to move troops back into rear areas to parry the thrust. They pecked at the landing party with Stukas, but the Russians had air power, too.

At week's end the fate of the Russian landing party was in doubt, but even if the German claim that it had been liquidated was true, it had done a good job. The thrust may have headed off a dangerous German advance by throwing the Nazis off stride.

Farther south the German pockets held. So did the Russian spearheads, thrust deep into the German lines. Near Kalinin, northwest of Moscow, the Russians announced that they had finally beaten off a fierce five-day counterattack by crack German troops, had killed 2,400, knocked out 25 tanks.

In that area, and as far south as Orel, below Moscow, the ground remained fairly hard, the weather brisk. Beyond, toward the Black Sea, the thaw had set in and the two armies fought in bottomless, gluey mud.

To the stubborn Russian troops in the fortress of Sevastopol, a convoy ran in supplies across the Black Sea. Meanwhile, in rear areas, tank engines were tuned, fuel moved forward, every day the sun shone brighter. And every day Russians and Germans, like swimmers fighting in a millrace, were swept closer to the battle that may decide the fate of Europe.

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