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The Germans paid. They wanted Sevastopol for great strategic reasons, and they particularly wanted it this week for a political reason: on June 22 German armies had been in Russia one year, the German people had not yet received their promised victory, and Adolf Hitler sorely needed an anniversary triumph to stiffen them for the great campaign to come.
The Armies Are Ready. Yet the spectacle of death at Sevastopol is only the overture for what is to come. In spirit, in the will to win or die, the Red Army has no superior. Just how it stands in effective numbers and vital weapons only the Soviet High Command knows. But two facts are known: 1) Russia is anxiously urging the U.S. to increase the flow of supplies; 2) since May, wherever the German and Russian armies have met in force, the Germans have won.
What London and Washington do know, within broad limits, is the general strength and distribution of the German armies:*
> On the northern front, from Murmansk to Staraya Russa below Leningrad—nearly 1,000,000 men in 35 German divisions (including three Panzers), twelve Finnish divisions, two Italian divisions.
> On the central front (Moscow, Kalinin, Rzhev, Vyazma, Bryansk)—over 850,000 men in 40 German divisions (including four Panzers), two Italian divisions and one Spanish.
> On the southern front (Kharkov to the Crimea)—about 1,300,000 men in 50 German divisions (including eight Panzers), 14 Rumanian and two Italian divisions.
> In reserve (in the occupied Ukraine, White Russia, the Baltic, Poland, East Prussia)—more than 1,500,000 men in 70 German divisions (including at least four Panzers and probably more), six Rumanian and four Italian divisions.
>In the Luftwaffe, now mainly in the south—about 6,000 front-line planes in three air fleets of 2,000 each.
Anti-Nazis liked to believe that the German armies were shells, that the stalemate and horror of the Russian winter had left them listless and broken. The Germans themselves have admitted 1,500,000 casualties. Perhaps Russia can discount the Spaniards and Italians; undoubtedly some of the Germans who bore winter's brunt were shaken in body and spirit. But the attack on Sevastopol was not the act of broken men; even the enslaved Rumanians fought and died by the thousands, along with their German masters. Last week Correspondent Leland Stowe interviewed recently captured Germans in Russia. Then he wrote:
"Psychologically, they are about as near being knocked out as Joe Louis in the third round—certainly no nearer. We in America and Britain, especially in our armed forces, had better face this fact. Any illusions about an early collapse inside Hitler's forces will only invite disaster. . . . Their spirits are unbroken, their wills stubborn and hard. . . . They will fight desperately, knowing that Germany loses everything, at least in their generation's lifetime, unless they win."
The Plan Is Ready. Gigantic problems now face Hitler in Russia: on a stupendous front his armies confront not only determined, well-armed foes (who probably outnumber the Nazis), but line upon line of prepared defenses in the rear, blocking every mile of his primary roads to Moscow and the south, his secondary objective in the north.