Four Victories

Last week, on the first anniversary of the vast German debacle at Stalingrad, the Red Army stood 800 mi. west of that shell-battered city. It was now only 500 mi. from Berlin.

It had crossed the borders of two prewar states (Poland, Estonia). In one week it had scored four spectacular victories. For the Russian man-in-the-street, pobeda--victory--was in the wintry air.

Pobeda I. To short, rotund General Leonid Govorov went the credit for the most momentous of the four successes. A month earlier he had been besieged in Leningrad. This week the Leningrad front was no more: Govorov's armies fought on Estonian soil. Estonia's capital, Tallinn, was only 150 mi. away.

Uneasy Scandinavia ticked off Govorov's real and potential gains:

P: The Baltic Fleet would soon be free to operate in the Gulf of Finland, could well land troops on the Finnish coast;

P: More than ever, Red submarines could prey on Germany's shipping in the Baltic;

P: Finland would soon be virtually isolated from her ally.

But Govorov's victory also had a heavy political tinge. It foreshadowed the reabsorption of the three Baltic states within Russia, after a 22-year interlude of independence. It presaged a near test of Russia's amended constitution (see p. 34). It strengthened the hand of the peace advocates in Finland. Above all, it put a new strain on Germany's morale--and that was a military gain as well.

Already reports this week spoke of a wholesale, panicky flight of Germans and home-grown Nazis from the Baltic States to the Reich. Refugees clung to the roofs of overcrowded trains. In Riga, ships were packed with evacuees.

Pobeda II. To the south 600 mi. another Red Army was driving forward on what was once foreign soil. Its chief was moon-faced General Nikolai Vatutin, captor of Kiev, perhaps Russia's most brilliant field commander.

Last week Joseph Stalin confirmed what Berlin had unhappily admitted two days earlier: the fall of Rowne (Rovno) and Luck (Lutsk), an 85-mile thrust into old Poland. Vatutin had bypassed the German-held roads, sent his men into the hub-deep mud of swamps and forests. Outflanked, the Germans retreated.

At Rowne, Erich Koch, Nazi "Commissioner for the Ukraine," had held his court, and the great German firms which plundered Russia and Poland had maintained their headquarters. Rowne's fall, like the Red entry into Estonia, had certainly raised a roaring echo in Festung Europa.

Pobeda III. At the open end of the Dnieper U, the Russians marked the Stalingrad anniversary with another encirclement of German forces. By sharp, converging 50-mile thrusts, the armies of Generals Vatutin and Ivan Konev had worked in behind one armored and nine infantry divisions--perhaps 100,000 men. Moscow reported that they were being rapidly liquidated.

To speed up the process, the Russians put Walther von Seidlitz, a German general captured at Stalingrad, before a microphone, authorized him to offer favorable terms of surrender. Said Seidlitz: ". . . you are faced with catastrophe. There is no more hope of relief. . . . [Germany] will be grateful for [your] capitulation and will recognize it as manly, honorable and soldierlike."

The Germans starved and died, but they did not yet surrender.

Pobeda IV. Farther south, General Rodion Malinovsky, a 45-year-old ex-corporal who fought in France in World War I, struck at the closed end of the Dnieper U. In a four-day battle, his Third Ukrainian Army drove through 30-odd miles of enemy defenses. Moscow announced that he had all but cut off five infantry divisions there. But more important still was his threat to the great Nazi strongholds of Krivoi Rog and Nikopol. When they fall (this week the Russians were fighting in Nikopol's suburbs), most of the Dnieper loop will be cleared out. Germany will face the prospect that both ends of its once well-knit line will come unraveled.

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