(See Cover)
The Germans are losing the war in Russia, which means that they are losing World War II.
On the frozen plains of Rzhev before Moscow, on the Don and in the Volga corridor at Stalingrad, in the snows and floods of the Caucasus, the Russians are on the offensive. But, as of this week, the Russian offensives alone are not defeating the Germans.
Time is defeating the Germans. Old victories and old defeats are defeating the Germans: the Red Army's stands, retreats and counterattacks; the Wehrmacht's losses at Smolensk, Rzhev and Moscow; the men and weapons spent, the weeks forever lost at Sevastopol; the spaces of the Ukraine, the Kuban plains and the upper Caucasus, conquered but nonetheless expensive to their conquerors; and, finally, the pit of Stalingrad. No one of these great battles, sieges or marches in the greatest campaign of history exhausted or defeated the German Army. But in the aggregate they saved Russia and they saved the Red Army.
Without this perspective, dispatches and headlines inevitably give the impression that the Russians stand to win all or lose all in their first winter offensives of 1942. The impression is not shared by the hard-eyed, hard-mouthed peasant, Communist and soldier, Army General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who commands the drive on the Rzhev front and had much to do with planning the others.
The Bridge. After the fashion of soldiers in all armies, the men of Engineer Sosnovkin's little command grumbled and, cursed. They knew well enough that the instructions came from General Mukhim, the commander on their sector of the Rzhev front. They supposed that General Mukhim had his orders from a man whom they seldom or never saw, whose name they almost never read in Red Star or Pravda, a man whom they all knew as the Liubimets (the pet, the favorite, the darling, the beloved) of the Red Army. But it was Engineer Sosnovkin, thin and unimpressive in his grey overcoat, who had to tell the men what General Zhukov, the Liubimets, now wanted of them.
He wanted them to build a bridge. This bridge was to span a river near Rzhev. On the bank opposite the Russians, the Germans were waiting & watching. Yet this bridge had to be so devised that the Germans would neither see the men while they were building it, nor see the bridge after it was built. The men gaped at Engineer Sosnovkin, and in their individual ways pondered the demands of the insatiable Liubimets. Then they went to work.
Engineer Sosnovkin decided to build his bridge in sections, 18 inches below the river's surface. For many nights his men practiced underwater construction on their side of the river, in a spot out of sight of the Germans. They set log pillars firmly in stone foundations. They clamped crosspieces to the pillars with oiled nuts and bolts. In the freezing water and darkness they did, it all by touch.