Prelude

The first heavy snows were sifting over the eastern front. While the Germans watched apprehensively the Red Army stirred. The breath of men and horses steamed in the crisp air. Soldiers stamped on the frozen mud roads to warm themselves. Winter and fighting weather had returned to the east.

Premier Joseph Stalin laid out the Red Army's objectives: "Now the last, final mission remains for the Red Army, namely to complete, together with the armies of our Allies, the task of defeating the German fascist armies, finishing off the fascist beast in his own lair and raising over Berlin the banner of victory. There is ground to reckon on this task being fulfilled by the Red Army in the near future."

When it came it would be one of the greatest battles--or series of battles--in World War II. From the Baltic to the Carpathians the Russians had ready nine army groups of perhaps 300 divisions (two more army groups were already moving in Yugoslavia and Hungary). Against them the Germans had ready an estimated 180 divisions (plus 24 Hungarian divisions already occupied in the south).

In the Fatherland. But the soil of Germany was different from the soil of Russia and its neighbors. In the homeland the Germans had built deeper, more elaborate defenses, had strengthened them for the last year with more than a million men of the Todt organization. Swedish reporters talked learnedly of a new German "rolling defense" fathered by Field Marshal Heinz Guderian, eastern front commander, now fully restored to Adolf Hitler's fitful favor. Already emplaced in whole provinces, enormous masses of movable concrete bunkers of eight to 15 tons, called "scorpions," formed "tank landscapes." Before them were six or eight zones of mine blockades including contact mines of glass, controlled mines fired by wire or radio. Enthroned in this system sat infantrymen with antitank rockets and guns.

Nevertheless, Moscow was confident, Berlin worried. Said one Russian commentator: "The present situation on the Soviet-German front can be called a pause before a new, annihilating blow at the enemy. This offensive will be directed . . . at Germany's vital-centers." Chimed in a Berlin spokesman: the Russian winter offensive is "directly imminent. ... It is not a real calm; it is the quiet before the storm."

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