The biggest battle in the biggest campaign in the biggest war in the history of man was joined last week. The Germans thought, prematurely, that they had won all three. "The campaign in the East is decided," said Hitler's Little Sir Echo as he set about explaining to the foreign press how and why Hitler thought they had won. Hitler's Little Sir Echo is his Press Chief, Dr. Otto Dietrich. As he stood in the palatial auditorium of the Propaganda Ministry, in front of a Russian map three times his own height, the suave, bright-faced unraveler of the Führer's tongue was more suave and bright-faced than ever.
First, by way of mental disarmament, he put his professional reputation up for ransom. "I have never misled you on the Western Front campaign," he said. "I pledge my good name for the genuineness of this information."
Claims. His information was a series of assurances with which he personally had just flown from Adolf Hitler's headquarters in Russia:
> The last intact Russian Armies, those of Marshal Semion Timoshenko, were trapped in two encirclements at Bryansk and Vyazma (see map), and faced inescapable annihilation.
> The southern Armies of Marshal Semion Budenny were routed. All that remained to block the German drive in the south was the strain on the Germans' own human endurance and the speed of their machines.
> The best of Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov's northern defenders were locked in Leningrad.
From these facts, said Dr. Dietrich, one could make sweeping deductions: "The military decision has already fallen. The rest of the operations will take the course we wish them to. For all military purposes Soviet Russia is done with."
But was it so easily done with? What would the German soldiers say who had yet to shed blood to accomplish this supposedly accomplished fact? What of Leningrad? What of Odessa? What of Marshal Budenny's remnants, who would certainly not ask to be captured? What of the thousands of untamed miles and millions of untamed men beyond Moscow? What of the wall of the Urals? What of the Russian Armies beyond the wall?
And what of hatred? What of the years of trying to organize this mass of resentment? Was this not Serbia a thousandfold?
How much, then, could the Germans say last week with truth?
Facts. They could say they had launched the biggest pitched battle ever fought. Acting on the fundamental Clausewitz dictum, "Concentrate the maximum of forces in the direction of the main blow," the Germans had drawn forces from both southern and northern fronts. They had thrown into this great push toward Moscow more than two-thirds of their entire infantry forces in Russia, three-quarters of their Panzer forces. Altogether the Germans were using some 1,700,000 infantrymen, 450,000 motorized troops, 14,000 tanks.
The Germans could say with truth that this time they commanded numerical superiority. They had tricked the Russians into sending important reinforcements to the Ukraine, so that now the most optimistic figure possible for Marshal Timoshenko's central forces was 1,800,000 men to the Germans' 2,150,000.