The miraculous speed with which the Red Army had taken Warsaw was merely an incident in the Russians' massive sweeps through western Poland. But Warsaw had been the prize of a major battle, a major event of the war. Marshal Georgy Zhukov's liberators did not pause long. But as they marched through, they could see the price of war (see FOREIGN NEWS).
Over the Rivers. The main battle for Warsaw had not been fought among its ruins, but for miles around them. Zhukov forced a crossing of the unfrozen Vistula 57 miles south of the city, widened his bridgehead and then struck with the full weight of his armor to carve out a breakthrough. Zhukov's tanks fought and won two battles as they sped northward to the Warsaw-Lódź highway. Eighteen miles north of the city another Russian force made its crossings, struck through to join the main column on the highway. Warsaw was taken from the rear. By the time it fell, most of Zhukov's columns were closing around Lódź, 70 miles to the west.
Zhukov's speed had never been matched by the Germans in their blitziest days. Off the roads, his route was over swamps and through forests. It was a terrain for Cossack cavalry to flush out enemy resistance left by the tanks. The Cossacks, in the style of their forebears, staged awesome attacks. One detachment caught almost an entire company of Germans, galloped among them with sabers slashing.
Over the Forts. As Warsaw was merely an incident of the great central drive, so Mlawa was an incident to the sickle thrust into East Prussia from the south, by Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky. Mlawa was a key point in what the Germans had called their Mitteleuropa wall, a depth of forts and trench works. It had zigzagged dugouts, trenches, minefields, concrete fire points. Rokossovsky's forces worked for two days on Mlawa, then painfully hacked through. Perhaps Mlawa was a symbol. For all its outer strength, it leaned on slender reeds of reserves — units of the Volkssturm, inhabitants of the town.
Gumbinnen was an incident in the blows of the hammer swung by Marshal Ivan Chernyakhovsky on Insterburg, north and east of Rokossovsky's sickle. Through the snows that covered the wooded Junker estates the Russians met furious resistance, ground it down by sheer weight. In Gumbinnen, every house had to be taken. There was a reason: seven of every ten German defenders were men born in East Prussia. There most of them died.
Over the Barriers. The Nida River was now an incident in the taking of ancient Cracow, Poland's fourth city and the gateway to southern Silesia and its complex of German industrial cities. At the Nida the Germans had worked six months to build an impassable barrier. Thousands of Yugoslav laborers had dug three lines of trenches on either side, protected by a string of strong points to the east. Marshal Ivan Konev made straight for these barriers, bypassed the strong points before the enemy had recovered from his breakthrough. Konev's advance forces crossed the formidable Nida line before the retreating Germans could man it.