Not Like Napoleon's

Like Napoleon, Adolf Hitler last week left Russia. But Hitler left only to make a speech (see p. 28). From the still-frigid shores of Lake Ladoga to the thawing quagmires of the Ukraine, his armies were proving better than Bonaparte's. The Russians kept slogging away at them. But they still held most of the great objectives that the Russians wanted before spring.

> In the north, the Germans still pocketed Leningrad. They beat off Russian thrusts around Staraya Russa and held that city with as few as 60,000 men, by Russian admission.

> In the center, they were untouched in Smolensk. The Russians were straining to blast the German concentrations from Rzhev and Vyazma, about 100 miles away.

> In the south, they kept Kharkov and Dniepropetrovsk, keys to the Ukraine, although the Russians made such onslaughts toward the Dnieper bend that German propaganda spoke, undoubtedly with wild distortion, of 1,500,000 attackers.

The fact was that the Germans still held nine-tenths of the ground they had taken in Russia, whereas in 1812, twelve weeks before this time of year, the Grand Army of Napoleon Bonaparte had quit the French-drenched Russian soil.

London military circles discussed how the Germans had done it. They gave chief credit to the enduring efficiency of the German supply organization and to what they called a "porcupine" defensive system. This consisted in the fortification of certain sizable towns, such as Rzhev and Vyazma, as strong points. These "porcupines" were prepared against attack in any direction, building after building being turned into a small fort, with fortified "quills," such as farm buildings, scattered around all the approaches to the towns. The Germans concentrated on holding these porcupines rather than solid lines.

During the winter, with quick, massed attack impossible, the porcupines were very hard to take and, as long as they resisted, Russian advances around or between them were vulnerable. The Russians found that guerrilla warfare between the quills of the porcupine was the best striking method. Russian communiques, with nice understatement, referred to the quills as "inhabited localities."

This week winter winds returned again to the southern front. But it appeared that the Germans had weathered the Russian season. There were several weeks of sticky wet weather ahead, when the determined Russians might make important headway. But for the time being the crucial battle of Russia was probably being fought in factories and fields far behind the lines, where fresh men were being trained, new weapons tooled, against the Russian summer.

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