BATTLE OF RUSSIA
(See Cover)
To the German burgher, this was the blackest New Year since Versailles. No oratory, no promise of retribution could conceal the vast and calamitous defeat in the East.
To the German soldier, this was January of 1943 all over again. For he was in flight, as he had been a year earlier. And again the icy road back was dotted with wrecked tanks, twisted guns, dead comrades.
Again Russian hamlets set afire by alien hands glowed in the bluish dusk, and misshapen figures dangled from the gallows. Again the thunder of Red artillery pursued the fleeing men through day & night, and white-painted Stormoviks hopped over the gaunt trees to bomb and strafe.
Adolf Hitler's year-end Order of the Day called 1943 "a second year of great crisis." His men at the front knew now that the crisis would grow, the retreat would go on. The Eastern Front was a heaving, bulging line, inexorably moving westward. No one could tell where it would be tomorrow, next week, next month.
Twin Perils. In the north, Armenian General Ivan Bagramian was hacking away methodically at the Vitebsk-Mogilev line (see map, p, 27). The great German stronghold of Vitebsk was engulfed. Orsha was in danger. And at any hour, the four huge Red Armies idling in the north might roll west, crush the thinly spread forces of Field Marshals von Kluge" and von Küchler, pour into old Poland, the Baltic States.
But the danger was still greater in the south. There Nikolai Vatutin's army of half a million men had torn a 200-mile gap in the lines of Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, and was now racing into the pages of history with furious momentum.
In ten days Vatutin's men had advanced 60-odd miles, captured 2,000 villages and towns. Korosten and Zhitomir, lately taken and lost, had been retaken. Berdichev, the bustling Jewish town once used by Manstein for his headquarters, was in danger. This week Vatutin pushed back the enemy, forced his way across Russia's Polish threshold.
The Gangrene. To a skilled tactician like Manstein, today's defeat was less grave than its impact on tomorrow. Already, his fleeing men had far outpaced the German armies in the north, exposing their flank. With each day, too, the position of his 20-odd divisions caught in the Dnieper bend became more desperate. A lone railroad of supply and escape was in grave danger.
He had failed to hold out behind the broad, free-flowing Dnieper. What chance did he have of making a stand behind the frozen Bug? The Dniester, alone, now some 100 miles behind the front, offered a potential line of defense. But the Dniester's right bank is in Bessarabia, and the echo of Russian gunfire there would echo throughout the Balkans.
Nor was the situation less desperate in Poland. Polish patriots may have no love for the Russians; for the Nazi despoiler they have only hate. And the Communist-dominated underground in eastern Poland may prove to be as effective as were Russia's guerrilla "armies of the forest."