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German armies poised on the outer borders of the industrial Donets Basin. But they did not have its mines, power plants and factories, or its roads to Caucasian oil. The Germans had forced a huge segment of Russia's industry back into the Urals, but they had not even won the approaches to that rear reservoir of might, where Russia's armies could be partly supplied even if most of Russia was lost. The Germans had the Crimea, they had Kerch on the Black Sea. But on their anniversary date they did not yet—not quite —have Sevastopol, the fortress which controls the Black Sea.
Above all, they did not have the Caucasus and its oil. An oft-told tale is Hitler's compelling need of oil, the abundance of which beckons him to Maikop and Baku. But another fact also draws him southward to the Caucasus: the Russians, too, must have Caucasian oil.
With the limited time available for reaching these goals, the Germans had to make all possible preparations in advance of their great offensive. All along the 2,000-mile front, from Murmansk to the Sea of Azov, innumerable local chores of war have been done. The World has heard echoes of these preparatory struggles in the news from the Kharkov front last month, in the tidings of skirmishes and minor battles last week below Leningrad, on the Moscow front, in the Kalinin area near Smolensk west of the capital, below Kharkov where the Nazis advanced. Greatest of them all was the battle for Sevastopol, whose seizure was both a necessary conclusion to the Nazis' Crimean conquest and an essential prelude to further drives in the south.
The Price Is Paid. "So now you have seen the defenders of Sevastopol. . . . The principal, joyous thought you have brought away with you is a conviction of the strength of the Russian people; and this conviction you gained, not by looking at all those traverses, breastworks, cunningly interlaced trenches, mines, cannon, one on top of the other, of which you could make nothing; but you have received it from the eyes, words and actions—in short, from seeing what is called 'the spirit'—of the defenders of Sevastopol. What they do is all done so simply . . . that you feel convinced they could do a hundred times as much. . . ."
So wrote a young officer of the siege of Sevastopol. His name was Count Leo Tolstoy, and the siege was during the Crimean War.
In Leo Tolstoy's day, the enemy dead—and the victors, after 127,000 Russians had fallen —were British and French. Last week a more dreadful foe, with more dreadful weapons, attacked and died and still attacked the deep defenses around the city. Leo Tolstoy's distant kinsman, Alexei, wrote in Red Star: "Now at Sevastopol there is no air fit to breathe because of the decaying bodies of German and Rumanians." Hitler's Colonel General Fritz Erich von Manstein drove his men ever closer, over the mounds of their dead, and a U.S. correspondent cabled: "The question at Sevastopol is not whether the Germans can take it, but how much they can afford to pay for it."