Nikolai Vatutin’s salient was a long, narrow thrust into prewar Poland. To the Germans it looked like a dagger that could strike at Rumania, at Poland, at the last remaining rail line feeding the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine.
For three weeks Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein tried to blunt the salient with the flesh of his men. Vatutin’s army, grimy with the dust of the 350 miles it had covered since last October, beat off the desperate attacks. Last week the hour struck.
Hard-driving Vatutin himself was not there. Moscow said he was sick. But his place was taken by one of the world’s topmost field generals—stocky, aggressive Marshal Georgy Zhukov, fresh from his victory at Korsun, where ten Nazi divisions met their end last month.
Down Thrust. Instead of pressing the dagger westward, into old Poland, Zhukov turned the point south. Twelve German divisions—four of them armored—were swept aside, a 120-mile gap was torn open, gains of 35 miles were made by the third morning. Early this week Zhukov’s men stood only 20 miles from the key German base of Tarnopol, in prewar Poland; only 30 miles from Rumania’s border.
But Zhukov’s greatest tactical gain was his blow at Nazi communications. He cut the Odessa-Lwów railroad. Three German armies still in the Ukraine had now lost their last rail line of escape, would have to retreat along the muddy country roads of Bessarabia and the Ukraine, or from the Black Sea’s battered ports. Manstein apparently had waited too long to pull out.
At Narva, some 680 miles to the north, the Russians hoped to score their next major success. After weeks of hammering, they had crossed the Narova River, breached the defenses put up by the Germans in their flight from Leningrad. Russian naval officers spoke of being in Estonia’s Tallinn within a month.
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