By last week the Russians' multiple winter drives, begun last November as a series of local counteroffensives, had developed into one of the great offensives of history.* From Leningrad to the Black Sea, along a 1,500-mile front (see map), the Red Army was staging one operation with one purpose: to break the German hold upon Russia at every point where the Wehrmacht had anchored its lines, then to smash into and destroy the rear systems of communication and supply, without which the Germans cannot recover in the spring.
The Red Army, having broken the German siege line at Leningrad (see p. 33), had then to defeat the formidable forces still intact near the city. Below Moscow the preliminary disintegration of Germany's southern positions and communications proceeded: the Russians retook the important railway center of Kamensk, Voronezh and pressed on Voroshilovgrad, advanced from north and south toward the German's pinion position at Rostov. The fall of Salsk and Armavir gave the Red Army a tighter hold upon the railways of the Caucasus, increased the prospect that the retiring Axis forces there can only retreat across the Black Sea into the Crimea. Ever nearer was a Russian thrust into the Germans' Kharkov line.
Open Your Eyes. The German people were finally told that catastrophe confronted their armies in Russia. Berlin's home propagandists prepared their audiences for the greatest shocks of the war—and for a major change in German strategy. Said the official German news agency: "The German High Command plans to shorten the whole of the Russian front and to build up a new main defense line." Broadcasters and communiqués admitted that the Germans were retiring from the Caucasus, that for the remnants of the once-great army at Stalingrad "there was nothing left but death."
An official German correspondent broadcast from the Don front: "When I first saw the endless Soviet columns, preceded by the heaviest tanks, an ice-cold hand seemed to grasp my heart. 'Almighty God, give us the strength to withstand this flood,' I prayed." The Nazis' official party journal, Völkischer Beobachter, informed its readers that "the last and highest decisions were at stake."
An Axis broadcaster said on the Paris radio: "Germany will never capitulate. Even if her army is defeated in the east and has to retreat to the west she will continue to fight. The German army will fight in the marshes of Poland, on the plains of Germany and, if necessary, on the hills of France."
Rome's radio spokesman moaned to the Italians: "The wording of the German bulletins must cause great anxiety, even among the Italian people. ... In two months we have not been able to see any pause in the Russian assaults, nor any sign that they are getting tired. The whole world is holding its breath. It is undeniable that the Russians have achieved important successes, and that the forces of the west are determined to beat us."
Bury the Dead. Last week, after a visit with other correspondents to the Stalingrad area, the New York Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr gave the outer world its clearest view yet of what hit the Germans.