(See Cover)
This week the clock struck. The time for Hitler's great attempt to crush Russia had come.
For Hitler has no second year in which to conquer Russia. He has at most four months, perhaps only three, in which Russia must be conquered or the war will be lost to Germany. From his standpoint, Russia must be liquidated as an enemy before the U.S. can throw its real weight into the war. Hitler must beat Russia in time to allow the German war machine to turn and meet the enemy in the West.
These basic facts were known when the Nazi High Command sat down to plan the German campaign of 1942. They are axioms which must have been burned into the military brain of Hitler's No. 1 strategist, Generaloberst Franz Haider, Chief of the German Army's General Staff.
He and the General Staff, anonymous servants of German arms, men who let higher-ranking field commanders take the glory while they take the basic responsibility, faced a well-defined problem.
This time they had to pin down the Russian army in order to crush it, for the Russians can even now retreat 1,000 miles without even reaching the Ural industrial area. To do this, the Germans had to be free to attack along the whole 2,000-mile battlefront. For this the Germans had to wait for good weather. Not until mid-June can the ground be counted on to be fit and hard in the north around Leningrad (a month later than in the Ukraine).
With this starting-time limit and the necessity of finishing before another winter, General Haider and his staff had to devise a plan for crushing Russia in a few months' time—a campaign as crushing as those against Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, a campaign better than the blitz-that-failed against Russia in 1941. This had to be the greatest thunderbolt of all and it had to strike on time.
Failure would almost certainly be loss of the war. But the prize of success was freedom to turn the German Wehrmacht loose on Britain and the U.S.—probably to take all Asia, possibly to take most of Africa, perhaps to take Britain itself.
After One Year. This week was the anniversary of Germany's first attack on Russia, and General Haider had the lessons of the first year's failures to help him in making his second year's plans.
After twelve months the Germans had occupied about 7% (some 580,000 sq. mi.) of Russia's land, but they had not conquered Russia. They had destroyed or captured upwards of 4,500,000 Red soldiers, 15,000 Red tanks, 9,000 Red planes. But they had not destroyed the Red Army. German artillerymen photographed Leningrad through their telescopes. But they had not captured Leningrad, with its mastery of the Baltic, its way to Murmansk and the Murmansk supply route. The swastika flew within 115 miles of Moscow. But the Germans had not tak en the U.S.S.R.'s heart and capital, the vast railway system which rays out from Moscow and serves most of Russia.