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Below Stalingrad Kerr found 44-year-old, stocky Lieut. General Rodion Yakovlievich Malinovsky, a onetime Czarist soldier who fought beside a U.S. division in France during World War I. Kerr asked General Malinovsky to explain the Red Army's power.
General Malinovsky's chief explanation was militarily direct: the Red Army was stronger than it had ever been before. He also said that as late as last summer Russian infantry had not learned to cope with Axis tanks, but now knew how to defeat them. Other reasons: the "bewilderment" of the Germans when the Russians attacked in several places at once; the recent reorganization of the Red Army (TIME, Jan. 11).
General Malinovsky took no stock in reports outside Russia that the Germans had invited disaster by withdrawing as many as 40 divisions to defend the Mediterranean. On the contrary, he said, new German tank and infantry divisions had recently appeared in Russia. From others Correspondent Kerr learned that, although the Germans had 26 armored divisions in Russia last November, 14 had been destroyed, encircled or so badly cut up that they were no longer effective. The rest were no match for the Red Army's strengthened and reorganized tank forces, nor for its artillery and infantry.
The Luftwaffe was also overtaxed early in the campaign. At first as many as 500 transport planes flew in every day with supplies for the besieged forces at Stalingrad. Later the daily flights averaged 150, losses were constant and the Russians captured several airdromes at both ends of the German supply line, forcing the Germans to fly farther.
On the Kalmuck steppes, below Stalingrad, the correspondents saw hundreds of ruined German tanks, munitions dumps captured intact, many abandoned guns. At Kotelnikov, where the Germans had failed in their chief attempt to break through and save their Stalingrad army, Correspondent Kerr traced the history of Axis disaster. In a park which the Germans had made a cemetery when Kotelnikov was securely theirs, the German graves lay between neat rows of bricks, and wooden crosses, bore the name, birth date and rank of each soldier. Then there were shallow graves, marked rudely and in haste. On the battlefields outside the town, the German bodies rotted where they had fallen.
* The Soviet Supreme Command this week claimed that 102 Axis divisions had been "routed," more than 200,000 prisoners and 13,000 guns had been captured.