The Maiden's Soldier

(See Cover) A girl kissed a soldier good-by

On her porch one lovely night

And as he slipped into the fog

In her window blinked a light. ...

The maiden wrote the soldier

That what they hoped for would transpire,

That her love would never die

And the light would not expire.

Now the soldier fights much harder

For his country--and the light.

This sentimental doggerel was published by Pravda as an inspiration to the Red Army, which with the smell of victory in its nostrils, last week was driving through the army which only three years ago was the smartest in the world.

The simple-minded soldier of the sentimental maiden--for the second time in six months--swept beyond Kharkov driving the Wehrmacht before him. He had swept the Germans from Stalingrad 450 miles, nearly to the Dnieper, been set back to the Donets when his supply lines grew overextended, and now was back again, pushing toward Poltava and the Dnieper, with the smart Germans choking the roads and their single southwestward railroad in retreat.

Farther north, the maiden's soldier only a month before had begun his attack against Orel, opening with a devastating barrage from (dispatches said) 3,000 gun barrels to a mile of front. Now he was pushing crack young German troops back on Bryansk and fighting 1,000 German planes a day that hammered at his ad vance.

North of Bryansk, the maiden's soldier attacked at Spas Demensk.

And near Lake Ladoga the maiden's soldier, said the Germans, was launching still another drive. If this was true, he was undertaking the greatest Russian offensive of the war along the whole 1,000-mile front.

If Poltava falls to the Red Army from Kharkov, the maiden's soldier will threat en Kiev and all the German forces in the Crimea and the Donets bend.

If Bryansk falls, the Red Army can turn northwest toward Smolensk, the nerve center of the German defense sys tem on the central front. In the Nazi-owned Stockholm Dagsposten a Berlin correspondent reported: If the German Army is unable to hold the Russian advance, Germany will collapse. Not only Red soldiers but the Nazis were beginning to see the maiden's light.

Objective. All the Russian pronouncements indicate that the Red objective is now to destroy the enemy army. Said the Army's Red Star: "Our main task is to prevent the enemy from escaping and to destroy their armed forces. When these are smashed, the fortresses will fall by themselves."

The outcome may be the same if the Red Army destroys the German Army or merely drives it back. If the Ukraine can be retaken, if the battle line can be shoved back into Poland--somewhere along the way, the German will to resist is almost certain to break.

The Great Unknown. The Red Army which today threatens Germany with downfall is still the great unknown of this war. As it was underestimated in the beginning, it may be overestimated now. According to Red military commentators, things are going as they are because of Stalin's brilliant strategy.

Little is known of the blunders, something is known of the lessons that the Russians have learned, of the mastery of the art of war which they have now obviously acquired.

Few American and British correspondents and few visiting big shots have been allowed glimpses of anything but small segments of the great battlefield--and then mostly after the battle has passed. Few Allied military observers--British or American--have been allowed to visit the front to study the Russian Army in action. Joseph Stalin, calling for arms and food, calling repeatedly for a second front, is still playing his cards very close to his blouse.

But from geography, from time and from the behavior of the enemy army, the Allies have been able to deduce certain hard facts. The world knows what the Germans took and how long they took to take it. The world has seen the German attacks decrease in scope and effect, has seen the Russians come back with ever-increasing power and effect.

German Weakness or Russian Strength? These facts tell the story of German losses, of German exhaustion. They also are convincing evidence that the Russians have progressively mastered the art of modern war, the new use of new weapons like massed tanks, the new use of old weapons like cavalry. There are still questions unanswered.

How much has the German decline been due to the fact that Hitler took on too big a job for Germany? How much of the German decline is due to the fact that Germany was not equipped to fight a long war and has been forced to live upon her military capital since the failure to win a decision in 1941? How much of the German decline has been due to the fact that the Russians have learned to outsmart and outfight them?

The next few weeks may partially answer these questions.

Russia's war is not yet won. As Germany exhausted herself trying to carry the war to Russia on a 1,500-mile battle line, Russia, in spite of her greater manpower, may also lose it by the same means unless the battle wisdom of the Russian Army is great enough to prevent it.

The German decline is at least partly due to the fact that the offensive which they held for so long proved relatively more costly to them than to the Russian defenders. Russian victory now hangs on the ability of Russia's generals to make the defensive also relatively more costly to the Germans than to the Russian attackers.

The Leaders. The battle wisdom on which this now depends must come from the heads of Russia's leaders. Part of it must come from the Soviet Supreme Command (Marshals Stalin, Shaposhnikov, Zhukov, Voroshilov, Vasilevsky, Voronov, Novikov). Part of it must come from the leaders who have actually wrought Russia's victories in the field.

Outstanding among these are the historic three who fought through Stalingrad's siege and counteroffensive--Colonel General Markian Mikhailovich Popov, Army General Nicolai Fedorovich Vatutin and Army General Konstantin Rokossovsky. They, along with Colonel General Vassily Sokolovsky and Colonel General Ivan Konev, were the men chosen to command the hydra-headed counterattack on Orel and Belgorod last month. They broke the short-lived German summer offensive of 1943 and developed the battle into a Russian onslaught.

They are the leaders (along with others, unknown outside of Russia) who are the driving forces of Stalin's Red Army.

The formerly clumsy, sluggish Red Army, subdivided into three army groups, has now been divided into many relatively small, fluid groups of armies which can be fused and split up again as the occasion demands. Three or five or seven groups may be thrown against one objective, regrouped and swung against another enemy sector under these tacticians and technicians of battle.

One of the most talented of these leaders is the blue-eyed, 6 ft. 4 in. Rokossovsky. He has not only Orel and Stalingrad on his record. He also commanded one of the seven armies which saved Moscow in the crucial year-end battle of 1941. Russian newspapers have marked him for his ability to inspire his men and learn the new lessons of war, his mastery of all military branches, his ability to outsmart the Germans.

Temperamentally and physically he is a product of Russia, huge and ebullient, fond of liquor, fond of women, a hearty man after the Muscovite heart. Militarily, he is a product of the Soviet system. He learned his fighting in World War I, in the civil wars of 1918-20 and in the Russo-Polish campaign of 1920. In Frunze Military Academy, nursery of Soviet generals, he studied tank and air warfare. The priestly-looking Rokossovsky fought in the great battle of Smolensk in July 1941, which was a Pyrrhic victory for the Germans. He learned the essence of German tactics the hard way, and how to parry them. "By studying German tactics we changed our own method of attack and step by step inflicted increasing losses."

He also acquired a disdain for the German Army, even while he recognized its mechanical strength. In a radio broadcast he was quoted as saying: "I fought against the fathers. Now I'm fighting the sons. ... I do honestly think the fathers were better soldiers. . . . Hitler has ruined the German Army. . . . The German Army is not a real army. It is an ersatz army. It is obsessed with the desire for gain. ... It is a commercial army, not a military one. . . . The quality of any troops must atrophy under such conditions."

And in August 1941, in a more speechifying mood: "Our army is the Soviet people. People are not machines and they cannot be destroyed. People are immortal. The German Army will disintegrate after the first heavy blows struck against it. It is the product of a lifeless, fascist idea, and is therefore doomed."

His colleagues have sopped up this contempt. Said one of his officers, when asked what errors the Germans made at Stalingrad: "The greatest error was in having Hitler for a strategist."

In the battle of Istra, north of Moscow, Rokossovsky's infantrymen stopped persistent German tank attacks with antitank rifles, Molotov cocktails and hand grenades. There he learned the staying power of foot soldiers properly equipped and properly led. This was the major blow in the Russian counterattack. Out of these engagements the towering blond man emerged with a shy, sly smile that hid his self-assurance. He had acquired a reputation as a brilliant, courageous leader.

Gaudiest feather in his cap was his command of the Stalingrad relief campaign. Rokossovsky's forces--tanks, infantry, artillery, aircraft and cavalry-crossed the Don to form a ring around Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus' 22 divisions, anticipated the point of a German counterattack, and in savage and protracted battle defeated the powerful Panzer army of Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein. It was Rokossovsky who signed the demand for capitulation sent to Paulus, which was rejected and which led to the final destruction of Hitler's Stalingrad army. It was the greatest single victory yet won by the Red Army. The strategy was the work of the Supreme Command. But the tactical execution was Rokossovsky's.

Miles to the west of Stalingrad's bloody battleground, Rokossovsky and his colleagues fought this week toward the fruition of the great Red Army's war. From Ladoga to the U of the Dnieper, the front was aflame and moving. The Russian maiden's light burned bright. And Rokossovsky knew how to lead the maiden's soldier through Hell and the Wehrmacht.

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