Retreat to Where?

Adolf Hitler's armies in southern Russia were in full retreat last week.

In all of World War II, no single fact had held such enormous possibilities. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812, Rommel's retreat from Egypt in 1942 involved the fate of continents; the Wehrmacht's retreat involves the fate of the world. When the full extent and meaning of the retreat are clear, the world will be better able to judge the winner of World War II, better able to gauge its length.

Battles in the Dusk. Beyond doubt the Wehrmacht had suffered far more than a grave defeat. It had met a disaster that grew hourly. Point after point along the 700-mile front from Orel to Novorossiisk fell like tenpins before the Russian avalanche. In ten weeks (less on some fronts) the Red Armies had advanced from 100 to 350 miles, often through deep snows, often in areas well suited for defense. At no point were they slowed down by the necessity of regrouping. The Russians said that they had already killed, wounded or captured nearly a million German and satellite troops since the winter offensives began, and that another 500,000 were in immediate peril.

But as of this week not enough was known of the nature of the fighting or of the strategies employed to tell where the Wehrmacht's disaster might lead. The outer world did not see the battles; it saw only the permitted accounts of the battles. Moscow correspondents could not visit the fronts. Where the Red Army had to fight for its gains, and where it had only to march in after the retreating Germans, the dispatches did not clearly say. If the battles were bitter, neither Moscow nor Berlin said much about them. What might well be the most significant retreat in history could be viewed only in half light.

Retreat to the Reich? Moscow said that the Germans were rushing up reserves and new equipment to stop the Russians. Berlin talked of "elastic German defenses leading to further withdrawals." Perhaps the Germans were withdrawing under duress. Perhaps the Russians were pursuing more than attacking but wanted to make their gains loom as large as possible. Perhaps the Germans' "further withdrawals" may eventually take them out of Russia. If so, these circumstances explained in part the speed of the Red Army's offensive.

Adolf Hitler's retreat to elastic defenses may have been too late for anything less than the complete failure of his Russian campaign. If so, his only hope is to withdraw to the Reich and convert it (and Western Europe) into an impregnable fortress (TIME, Feb. 8). But that remained to be proved. What had been proved was that the Red Army was giving his Wehrmacht no rest or resting place.

Over the Donets. Save only at Stalingrad, the Germans have not made a determined stand in south Russia or fought lengthy delaying actions since they failed to relieve the forces on the Volga.

At the least, if they intended to fight for southern Russia, they might have been expected to stick doggedly to the Donets River line running southeast from Kharkov through Voroshilovgrad. But last week Colonel General Nikolai Vatutin's armies crossed the Donets and captured Izyum on the railway between Kharkov and Rostov. The fall of Izyum meant: 1) that the Red Army had a springboard for a jump toward Dniepropetrovsk 125 miles southwest; 2) that Kharkov was threatened by a pincer arm from the south; 3) that Voroshilovgrad (whose capture was apparently imminent) had in effect been bypassed some 90 miles to the northwest.

This week one column of Vatutin's army, rolling south, was within 100 miles of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, thereby threatening to block the Wehrmacht's retreat from Rostov. There is a chance that before spring the Wehrmacht may lose all of the rich Donets basin west to the Dnieper River--the last natural defense line inside Russia.

Kursk Captured. Farther north, Colonel General Filip I. Golikov's forces, completing a 125-mile thrust on skis and motorized sleds, captured Kursk, one of the main pivots of the German line in south Russia. This brilliant advance not only brought the Russians past the line from which the Germans began their 1941 offensive, but it cut Kharkov off from all its northern Nazi supply bases. The fall of Kursk also enables Colonel General Golikov's armies to swing south and close on Kharkov itself.

Other forces under Golikov, operating in the rear, surrounded a "death pocket" of 25,000 Germans--all that remained of an army which in mid-January numbered some 150,000.

In the Caucasus the story was the same. Two swift Russian smashes wedged some 200,000 Germans under Field Marshal Siegmund Wilhelm Walther List into a narrow strip along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov north of Novorossiisk. At week's end the Russians said that, by taking Yeisk on the Sea of Azov, they had closed the Germans' last channels of escape via Rostov. There were reports of the Red Fleet's harrying boatloads of Germans fleeing across the narrow (3 mi.) Kerch Straits to the Axis-held Crimea. The most the Nazis could hope for was a Dunkirk, but it seemed more likely that they would suffer another Stalingrad.

The 250,000 Germans in and around Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus, up to this week had offered about as little resistance as the Russians did to the Germans last summer. Soviet tanks, artillery and infantry breached the defenses on Rostov's south and southeast perimeter. Cavalry under Colonel General Andrei Ivanovich Yeremenko swept into Bataisk, only twelve miles south of the city. The Russians then announced that they had advanced to the left bank of the Don, and had begun to shell the Germans in the city itself.

Clear the Road. "I am in despair," wrote a German soldier in his diary on Hitler's tenth anniversary as the Reich's Chancellor. "How much longer is it going to last? . . . What have I done? If I could only live in peace." When Soviet Author Ilya Ehrenburg saw the diary he provided the answer: "Who asked you to come to our country? You could have stayed at home with your wife. But you chose Hitler. There is only one thing left for you: 'Die, scoundrel! Clear the road for life!' ':

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