How to Attack

The Red Army tightened its coils around charred, desolate Korsun (see map), early this week choked the town off. In the surrounding area, the remnants of ten German divisions still fought, still hoped. But hope was running low. They were pressed in so tightly that all their airfields were under artillery fire. German transports with food and ammunition occasionally broke through with dropped deliveries, but Russian fighter pilots intercepted most of the lumbering air freighters and shot them down.

To the southeast, on the soggy approaches to Nikopol, five other divisions were Still desperately fighting their way down to the Black Sea. They were harried by the low-flying Stormoviks and pursued through the thick, black mud by Russian mobile columns. For many a German soldier the icy Dnieper was the end.

Other German defeats in other areas impended:

> At Krivoi Rog, where the Red Army was closing in on the last great Nazi hedgehog in the Dnieper loop.

> South of captured Shepetovka, where the Reds were now only 55 miles from the German "escape road" from Odessa to Warsaw. A five-day offensive netted the Russians a 41-mile advance, 800 towns and villages, including Luga.

> In the north, where the Russians were only 40 miles from Pskov, the main support of the German defense system in the region.

More painful to the Germans than all this promise of trouble was the loss of the great captured empire which was to feed Germany's factories and her people. Gone were the oil of the Caucasus, the wheat of the Ukraine, the coal of the Donets basin. Now, at Nikopol, the Germans lost more than half of the manganese used by their industry. When the iron of Kirvoi Rog is lost, Hitler's fond dream of military and economic self-sufficiency in Russia would come to an end.

The General Staff. The credit for Hitler's failure went to many: soldiers, factory workers, railwaymen. Russia was also beginning to realize that a big part belonged to the officers of Generalnyii Shtab --the General Staff--who plotted Russia's offensives with precision, boldness, readiness to test new concepts. What Russia's Shtab had achieved in the shadow of defeat and in the pursuit of victory had few parallels in military annals.

Since its first big counterattack before Moscow in 1941, the Shtab had plotted a dozen major and scores of minor offensives. From these a definite pattern had emerged. A drive's duration depended on weather, terrain, German defenses, human endurance, condition of roads, ability of the transport system to feed the offensive.

But though the conditions varied, the time element remained fairly constant. Minor pushes lasted four days to two weeks. (Their aim: a local objective, a test of the enemy's strength, a feint.) Major offensives lasted an average of two to four weeks (on the Vitebsk front, 19 days; Orel, 30 days; Smolensk, 25 days; the first offensive into Poland, 27 days; the thrust into Estonia, 21 days).

The systematic pattern became still clearer after the Dnieper Line was breached last fall. In the summer the Red tide rolled slowly, inexorably, all along the front. But once west of the Line, the Red tide split into smaller, sharper, often speedier currents. Now, when an offensive bogged down, another was launched elsewhere--far enough apart to make the shift of German reserves difficult and perilous. For the Wehrmacht, survival became hinged to its ability to outguess the Red Shtab, hold on to every hedgehog as long as possible, handle its reserves with miser's care. For once, the famed Staff men of the Wehrmacht had met their betters.

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