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Yet, after Moscow had announced the first penetration, the Russians for days claimed almost no specific gains. There was a reason, and it was not necessarily that the offensive was failing: the German salient was designed expressly to withstand just such attacks and to survive just such penetrations.
Rzhev, key to the German system, is one great nest of tank traps, mine fields, barbed wire, artillery emplacements and pillboxes for riflemen and machine-gunners. Nearly every building is a fort. But the defense works between Rzhev and the other cities and towns of the system are not solid lines. They are deep, broken lines of highly fortified "hedgehogs," each self-sufficient, each designed to withstand encirclement, to serve as a base for counterattacking tanks, artillerymen and infantry, to grind attacking forces between the many strongpoints.
The Task. "Breakthroughs" in such lines mean almost nothing. Cutting the roads and railways means little more. Both Rzhev and Velikie Luki were surrounded last winter. Rzhev was partly encircled in August and September, during a Red offensive which seemed to be a failure at the time but may have been only in preparation for the great winter show. Siege was what the Germans' siege points were built for and supplied to resist.
The Russians gave a clue to their task when they said of the fighting around Velikie Luki that their forces now had to reduce the Germans' "encircled positions." The crucial battle was a slow, brutal, man-devouring series of struggles for the hedgehogs.
In scope and intensity, the offensive exceeded its counter-parts of last winter on the central front. London heard that Joseph Stalin was with his Litibimets at field headquarters. The Germans, who for weeks had observed, reported and presumably countered the Russians' preparations, said that fighting was in progress from Kalinin, north of Moscow, to Lake Ilmen below Leningrad. No one outside the Red Army command knew precisely what Stalin and General Zhukov hoped for. But at least their offensive provided a tremendous diversion, supporting the Red Army's drives in the south. At most it might lift the Nazi threat to Moscow with the capture of Rzhev, tear apart the Germans' entire winter line, lead to the relief of desperate Leningrad, bring the Russians to Latvia and the gates of Adolf Hitler's inner fortress.
These possibilities, immense in themselves, looked even more immense in comparison with the Russians' early claims. If the advance was slow and painful, it was probably no more so than the Russians expected.
The Tide. If the offensive on the central front had the possibilities of a great victory, the Red Army's offensive at Stalingrad had the appearance of one in the making.