Never had the Red Army seemed so near to sweeping the invaders from Soviet soil. In Berlin’s bomb-scarred Foreign Office a gloomy spokesman told Swedish journalists that the Russians’ third winter offensive had achieved a “very deep penetration.” A Nazi official explained: the German High Command “does not intend to keep Russian territory occupied only for reasons of prestige. . . . Retreat from Russian soil . . . would be a secondary question compared to whether the front had been broken along the entire line.”
The Red Army had not broken the entire line, but it had burst more than one seam. It was marching into a fragment of Poland, toward Rumania, toward the Baltic States. The border of Germany proper, at its nearest, still lay 340 miles across the buffer lands. But of pre-1939 Russia the Wehrmacht now held a slipping grasp on approximately 200,000 square miles; once it was master of 527,000 square miles of Russia.
Into Poland. For political reasons the Russian communiques disdained the word “Poland” (see p. 18). They spoke, instead, of gains “in the direction of Sarny.” On the pre-1939 map, Sarny lay deep within Poland’s Pripet Marshes, 35 miles beyond the Russian frontier. By week’s end a swift-moving (150 miles in a fortnight) column of General Nikolai Vatutin’s First Ukrainian Army stood almost at the city’s gates. In a region of few roads, many forests and lakes, Sarny is a traffic hub. Through it passes a main north-south railway; without it, the Wehrmacht’s forces in Poland would be cut in two.
Toward Rumania. In the massive Battle of the Dnieper Bend, churning between Kiev and the Crimea since October, the Red Army won two key towns, gave Marshal Joseph Stalin cause to issue special orders of the day, Moscow cause to jubilate with fireworks and cannon.
To General Vatutin’s men fell Berdichev, a manufacturing center and traffic junction, once the headquarters of Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein’s South Russia Command. A bitter, five-day attack expelled the Germans from Berdichev, battered them back toward the next and last railway from the Ukraine into Poland. To General Ivan Konev’s Second Ukrainian Army fell Kirovograd, a station on a trunk railway leading westward from the far end of the Dnieper Bend.
In their Dnieper salient, some 500,000 Germans were now in peril. Through Berdichev the Red Army hurried to choke off the salient’s corridor to Poland and Rumania. By week’s end General Vatutin’s men were less than 65 miles from the pre-1939 Rumanian frontier. At Kirovograd and other points on the salient’s rim the Red Army hacked off and trapped hunks of the enemy. The Wehrmacht had spent precious, dwindling reserves in the November-December counterdrive west of Kiev. Now the hard question facing Manstein was not whether he could hold the salient, but whether he could get out of it in time. The Russians spoke of many prisoners taken, of “disorganized” Wehrmacht columns “powerless to stem our troops.” But they also admitted the fierceness of German resistance. Marshal von Manstein’s men held out long and bitterly in their strong points, could still stage local counterattacks.
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