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In the second week of their culminating blow — and the tenth of Marshal Semion Timoshenko's long effort to break into the Don elbow and relieve Stalingrad from the German rear — the Russians won the positions from which they must now fight for the victory. They cleaned the Germans from a great, thinly defended patch, 50 to 100 miles deep, within the Don bend and west of the corridor between the Don and the Volga. They forced the Germans to establish a defense line on the Don's eastern bank, with their backs to Stalingrad, facing the Russians on the western bank. Then they broke the line by a brilliant assault upon the bedeviled Germans' new rear.
According to the Russians, they controlled the Germans' only main railways into Stalingrad, and even held a spur running westward from Stalingrad to the Don. The Red Army apparently also held or dominated most of the German highway routes.
On the face of these reports, an Axis army of some 300,000 Germans and Rumanians was all but bottled up in Stalingrad and on the Stalingrad steppes. The encirclement, capture or destruction of this army, along with the loss of the Germans' pivotal position in southern Russia, would be for Hitler a catastrophe greater than the disaster in Libya.
Yet the German High Command was strangely calm last week. Neither official communiques nor Axis broadcasts reflected the hysteria which has attended the Germans' previous setbacks in Russia.
The Germans capped their apparent calm with a report similar in tone to their accurate (and equally unflurried) forecast of the Rzhev offensive. They said that at Voronezh, where the Russians last summer kept a foothold on the Don 300 miles northwest of Stalingrad, the Red Army was assembling forces for a third offensive southward toward Rostov.
Such an offensive, if successful, would: 1) complete the entrapment of the Axis armies in the Don-Volga area; 2) bar the Germans' way of retreat to their last summer's line (Taganrog-Kharkov-Kursk-Orel) ; 3) finally doom the halting German drive in the Caucasus, perhaps cut off the Caucasian armies' last line of supply and retreat through the Crimea; 4) force the Germans to draw further on their dwindling reserves.
Zhukov. Joseph Stalin keeps his chosen advisers close by him. Army General Zhukov, at 45 (or 48, some say) officially a Hero of the Soviet Union, wearer of the Order of Lenin and victor over the Japanese in Mongolia, is First Vice Commissar for Defense and second only to Commissar Joseph Stalin in U.S.S.R. military councils.
Georgy Zhukov fought in the Red Revolution, served and studied under the Red Army's famed mentor, Mikhail Frunze. He is a horseman and hunter, was successively a teacher at military schools, a staff officer and a field commander in the pre-1941 Red Army. Even Russians know little else about him, for General Zhukov has made it his business to stay out of the public prints and eye.