Questions in Berlin

On the Russian front, where this war may yet be decided, the greatest armies in the world skirmished, probed and par ried. South of Moscow, in the sector where the biggest forces were concentrated, a few Russian battalions seized four German positions. A few German battalions tried & failed to recapture the positions, and to that small extent the Red Army was in better shape to break a major German offensive, or to launch one of its own. Both the Luftwaffe and the Red Air Force, for the first time in the Russian war, turned their main energies to strategic bombing behind the battle lines. The Russians struck at German airdromes, supply trains and supply dumps, the Germans at Russian munitions centers.

All this was preparation. But for what?

It Is Late. By the third week of last June the Germans were storming Sevastopol. They had broken a great Russian assault on Kharkov. They had completed their preparations for the Wehrmacht's advance to disaster in the Caucasus and at Stalingrad. Between the end of March and June's third week this year, the Germans had merely held what they retrieved from the Russian winter offensive. Nowhere had the Russians attempted an attack on the scale of their Kharkov offensive last year. Only in the Kuban, the Germans' last bridgehead in the Caucasus, had the Red Army attempted a major action, and this attempt had failed.

Both sides were waiting. But for what?

It Is Different. In June last year the Germans had some 240 divisions available for the Russian front. Despite the losses of the first winter, they were fresh. They were splendidly equipped. The Luftwaffe was master of the Russian air. Yet in 1942 the Germans dared not attempt a front-wide drive to knock out Russia and the Red Army. Heavy though the southern blow was, it was a limited blow, intended to cripple rather than to kill.

This year the Germans have fewer divisions in Russia (according to Winston Churchill, 218). Many of these divisions are now veterans of defeat; many are probably below strength, or padded with misfits. The Luftwaffe is no longer master of the air and, at least in some sectors, it has already been mastered by the Red Air Force. On no sector, not even in the critical Orel area south of Moscow, have the Germans been able to mass the strength which they assembled in the south last year.

Certainly the Germans now know that they cannot defeat the U.S.S.R. by seizing vast areas, or even by destroying separate Russian armies. They may well attempt a limited offensive at Orel. But the Germans have no place to go, no way to win by their own military efforts in Russia (TIME, May 17).

Logically, they could only hope and wait. But for what?

It Is Costly. For both sides the waiting was not easy, and it was not cheap. In many small actions along the front ground losses were constant. The Russians said they killed 2,000 Germans near Orel. Moscow said that the Luftwaffe, in seven weeks of May and June, had lost 3,595 aircraft, the Russians 987. Just how to evaluate these claims, the outer world did not know.* If literally true, they indicated that actions larger than any announced to the public had been in progress, that the Luftwaffe was helpless and decimated, that the Germans had no chance of survival, much less of victory, in Russia.

According to the Russian accounts, the Luftwaffe was still active on and just behind the fronts, and had enough bombers to trouble the civilian defense organizations in Volga cities under air attack. It also seemed probable that during the recent Russian drive in the Kuban, a narrow area suited to air assault, the Luftwaffe had the upper hand in that sector. A reasonable guess: the Red Air Force, now using many American planes, has general superiority on the front as a whole and is in excellent position to wear out the Luftwaffe in a struggle of attrition.

It Is Dangerous. The Red Army, reorganized under a fresher, younger command (TIME, Jan.11), is strong and ready. Foreign observers, judging by the little shown to them, believe that the Russians' artillery, tank and air forces are more formidable than ever, and the Red infantry forces undoubtedly outnumber the Germans. But the Russian people have paid, and are still paying, for their front-line army with exhausting sacrifice behind the lines. Many a non-Russian authority believes that this process cannot continue indefinitely, and that here, if anywhere, lies one of the Germans' two chances of survival or victory in Russia. The other chance: a Japanese attack on Russia's Siberian rear, a possibility which the Russians cannot ignore.

The Russians are no longer demanding a second front. They simply say, from week to week, that it is coming.

On June 22, the second anniversary of German invasion, Moscow broadcast a resume of losses: German, 6,400,000 men, 42,400 tanks, 43,000 planes; Russian, 4,200,000 men, 30,000 tanks, 23,000 planes. Russian victories had turned the balance of power and "the Germans have stopped believing in victory." But, in a vein grimly reminiscent of mid-1942, when Moscow officialdom realized that there was to be no second front that year, the broadcast added: "Then Hitler utilized the absence of a second front. To be late now means that our common cause will seriously suffer."

*Such losses, coupled with losses in Western Europe and the Mediterranean, would mean that the Germans are losing at least four times the number of planes they are building. Allied estimates of bomb-crippled German production run as low as 1,000 per month.

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