The Road Leads Backward

The greatest victory in Russia was the victory of Moscow (see p. 18). Already retreating on the fighting front, Adolf Hitler and the Wehrmacht lost their last hope of salvage through Allied discord, their last chance that the Red Army might forgo the complete defeat of the German armies in the east.

That news overshadowed the Red Army's gains in southern Russia last week. But the gains were large, and they measurably hastened the day of final victory. Paced by tanks and Cossacks (see cut), Russian columns raced across the Ukraine's rain-sodden steppes and marshlands, headed west toward the borders which the Germans crossed in 1941, south toward the Crimea.

The Punch. The Wehrmacht still fought with skill and fury but it could not deny victory to the Russians. What it desperately sought now was to survive as an army, establish yet another line of defense, prevent the infection of defeat from spreading northward. It remained a powerful fighting organism. But there were signs of decay. Behind the Russian lines straggled mobs of dejected prisoners. Except at a few picked points, the German defense in the south was confused and ill-directed.

> In the extreme south, a Russian column this week captured Perekop, the Crimea's bridge to the Ukraine and the Germans' last land route of escape.

> Two fast columns closed in on the Dnieper's underbelly, one threatening to trap large German forces in the Dnieper bend, the other advancing toward the city of Kherson, formerly a big submarine-building base.

>The fiercest battles were fought near Krivoi Rog, in the heart of the Dnieper bend. This devastated iron center also protected a German escape corridor across the southern Ukraine. The capture of Krivoi Rog would culminate the lower Dnieper campaign, enabling the Red flood to roll southward, cut off perhaps a score of German divisions.

> Farther north, powerful Russian columns inched closer to the German strongholds at Kiev, Gomel, Vitebsk. German defenses forbade a quick breakthrough. But the steady punching kept the worried German command from shifting its troops from these threatened cities to the crumbling line in the south.

When the Sun Rises. In Germany, the facts were beyond concealment. Said an eyewitness report from the Eastern Front in the Berliner Lokalanzeiger:

". . . As soon as the sun rises there will be the first shots; the enemy again will be after us and will attempt to find some weak spot in our positions. . . . The full influx of the enemy will rush at us, powerful as a flood, with forces tenfold as strong as ours. And we are but . . . weary infantrymen who have forgotten what sleep is like; and who for eternities have been lugging and pushing heavy loads along muddy roads and across soaked fields.

"Everything that happens is overshadowed by the mental depression that affects each of us, for we know that our road can lead but backward."

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