"Citizens, Listen!"

Nearly all week the skies over Moscow were dull, dripping, cold. One evening, when damp workers were hurrying home or to night-shift jobs, the familiar voice of Announcer Yuri Levitan boomed at them from loudspeakers in the squares: "Govorit Moskva! [Moscow speaking!] Citizens, today at 7:40 there will be transmitted over the radio important news. Listen! . . . Citizens, listen!"

At 7:40, after the Song of the Motherland was played, crowds waiting in the drizzle heard the first order of the day. Bialystok had fallen.

At 8:00, the city's well-worn victory guns boomed, and antiaircraft women on the roofs fired colored rockets. Against the wet sky, still pale with dusk, the fireworks made a poor show. The people wondered why this celebration had started so early. In the first week of the offensive, Citizen Stalin had issued the unprecedented number of three proclamations in one day. Was that number to be surpassed tonight?

It was. Four more times, five times in all, every hour up to midnight, the loudspeakers blared, the guns boomed, the rockets soared. By 10 o'clock Red Square was jammed. The sky was dark now, and the red, blue, green and orange rockets made, a better show--as if, said Tass the next day, "the palette of a magic painter had come alive on a gigantic canvas." Every Moscow paper had a leading editorial on the "Day of Five Salutes."

In addition to Bialystok, the towns conquered in one day by the Red Armies were Lvov and Stanislavov in southern Poland, Dvinsk in Latvia, and Shavli, an important rail junction in Lithuania. If the Germans had been resisting as stubbornly as a year ago, any one of the five would have been deemed worth weeks of siege.

Deliverance at Hand. There were no fireworks in Warsaw. That grim, ruined capital rocked with the crash of bombs from Red planes on the rail stations and yards. The ragged, starved, decimated people of Warsaw could also hear the approaching thunder of Russian artillery.

It meant deliverance--to onetime university professors who swept the streets, to onetime symphony musicians who played on the corners for scraps of food, to the dead-faced people who thronged the churches. In the ghetto there was scarcely anyone alive to hope. For deliverance from the grinding boot of the Nazis, Warsaw had waited longer than any other capital of Europe; it was nearly five years. The Polish underground was doing what it could to help the Russians, and it so notified Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Premier of the London Polish Government, who flew to Moscow last week to TIME, AUGUST 7, 1944 discuss the Russian-Polish problem with Joseph Stalin (see FOREIGN NEWS).

South of Warsaw, Marshal Rokossovsky's armies swarmed to the Vistula, cleared a 60-mile stretch of the east bank, paused while their artillery poured hell into the German positions on the other side. Here the river was 600 feet wide, but no river had held up the Red engineers very long.

East of Warsaw, the great fortress of Brest-Litovsk finally fell, days after it was completely encircled and Rokossovsky's tanks had sped 'on across the Polish plain.

Lvov, the greatest rail city of southeastern Poland, was taken by wily, egg-bald Marshal Konev, commanding the First Ukrainian Army in place of Marshal Zhukov, who had gone to Moscow to be Stalin's deputy commander in chief. On the rail line to Cracow, Konev stormed Przemysl and Jaroslav. At Przemsyl he was 180 miles from the Silesian corner of Germany.

Two Pockets. General Bagramian, Armenian-born, thrust a long salient into Lithuania. At the tip of it he occupied

Shavli, cut the railroad from Riga to Tilsit in East Prussia, and left only a one-track line through Memel as an escape route for some 30 German divisions on the Baltic fronts. Bagramian then blocked even this forlorn loophole by broadening his salient northward to the junction at Jelgava.

Until that happened, the Germans seemed to be making some belated efforts to evacuate southward; Red pilots reported bombing southbound troop trains. But the railroads were lost now. At Jelgava, the Russians were only 25 miles from the sea. The Germans were thus caught in two pockets--one between Riga and the Gulf of Finland, the other between Riga and East Prussia.

This seemed like an opportune time to strike at East Prussia. At week's end, young General Chernyakhovsky, who had paused on the border for a whole fortnight, slashed into the Suwalki triangle, which Germany annexed in 1939. Bagramian's drive toward Riga while Chernyakhovsky waited had probably cost the latter his chance to be first to the sea. Now Chernyakhovsky held in his grasp a greater honor: that of seeing his divisions the first to tread the earth of Germany.

Self-Acceleration. In the far north, Marshal Govorov woke up the sector above Lake Peipus with an attack which overran Narva, which the Germans had held since Govorov drove them back from Leningrad. This action extended the active front to a reach of 800 miles from the Carpathians to the Gulf of Finland. The stretch had been excruciating for the Germans. It was possible that the Soviet high command had not originally intended to stretch it so fast, to keep so much of it in motion at one time, but--always quick to exploit an unexpected weakness--had been encouraged to do so by the self-acceleration of the German catastrophe. Maintaining the supply lines to feed such an offensive seemed, to the outside world, a greater problem than beating the Germans in battle. But it had been done.

The result has been the most rapid conquest of territory in modern history. In the first 38 days of their onslaught, the Russians pushed their enemy out of 110,000 square miles. Every hour, on the average, they had swept over 121 square miles. In 38 days the Russians claimed to have killed and captured more than a half million German troops. From Vitebsk to Warsaw, they had traveled more than halfway to Berlin.

There was no way last week for the world to know what orders were going to the German front commanders from the tottering, feuding citadel of Nazidom. It was possible that most German commanders were making their own decisions whether to fight, flee or quit. At this climax of the war, it made little difference what they chose.

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