Another Year

The worst news for Russia last week was not the peril to Sevastopol, nor the Nazi advance below Kharkov. For the U.S.S.R. and her Allies, the worst news was that on the two fronts where the Germans attacked in strength last week they had more men, more planes, more tanks, more everything than the Russians had.

It was proof that, after all the agonies and losses of the Russian winter, the German armies were strong and fresh. And it was proof that in this new year of war Russia will need all the aid, on a second front and on her own fronts, that the Allies can give her.

"The August City" is what the Russians call Sevastopol, their great port and naval fortress on the Black Sea. It is not a big city (civilian pop.: 67,000), but it is a majestic town with cathedrals, palaces, a mighty harbor where all the warships in Europe could anchor, a holy "Common Grave" near by. That grave holds the dust of 127,000 Russians who died at Sevastopol in 1854-55, when Britain and her allies in the Crimean War besieged the city. Nine miles south of Sevastopol is the town of Balaklava, where the Light Brigade's 600 rode against the Russian batteries. Last week many times 600 Nazis died near Balaklava, but the Russians called their defensive maze of gunpits and tank traps nothing so poetic as "the valley of death." They called it "the meat grinder." Jaws of the grinder were two stony heights, Fediukhiny to the south and Mekenzevy to the east. Guns emplaced on these slopes commanded all the land approaches to Sevastopol. Below them, and between them and the city, was an unbroken mass of emplacements, trenches and shelters dug into the soft white-&yellow limestone and into the red-brownish slate of the hilly countryside. They comprised probably the most thorough "defense in depth" ever organized. Southern Russia's young summer was already hot, and last week half-naked Nazis lunged against these hills, died in the forest of guns.

Hitler's General Fritz Erich von Manstein had thrown some 100,000 men into this effort to smash Russia's last strong hold on the Crimea, to abolish the southern anchor of the long Russian front, to win command of the Black Sea, to open one gate to the oil-rich Caucasus. He also threw in planes, so many that the Russians soon--and ominously--admitted that the few Russian aircraft able to operate within Sevastopol's narrowed defense area were greatly outnumbered.

Lacking air control, the Russians found it difficult, if not impossible, to reinforce Sevastopol from the sea, and the Germans had closed all the land approaches. Swarming Nazi bombers pounded at the Russians' bristling caves, at the city itself.

Probably, since the port was all but immobilized by air siege and they wanted to use it themselves, the Germans did little or no damage to the great docks and naval yards.

At week's end the Russians said that German planes were dropping iron rails, plowshares, other clanging hunks into the city to demoralize besieged civilians. The Russians showed no signs of demoralization. Only the cold communiques from Berlin, the warmer rhapsodies to valor from Moscow, indicated a slow Nazi ad vance. This week, on the eve of Hitler's second year in Russia, the question at Sevastopol was how much Nazi meat it would take to choke the grinder.

On the Kharkov Front, the admitted Nazi superiority was even more ominous. There the Russians had unlimited airfield space. Only the demands of other fronts and Russia's military capacity limit the forces available to Marshal Semion Timoshenko. Except at Sevastopol, which made no demands because it could not be reinforced, the other fronts were comparatively quiet.

Since Marshal Timoshenko's old opponent, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, had the advantage of opening the attack, it meant little that the Russians were outnumbered at first. What did loom darkly were the successive indications of the Moscow dispatches: first the censors allowed a guess that Bock was testing Timoshenko's "remaining manpower," then a reference to advancing Nazi forces, finally the outright statement from Moscow that the Germans had the advantage in numbers of men, tanks, planes. Thus Berlin, was probably telling the truth in a communique claiming the recapture of a, bridgehead between the Donets River and Kharkov--the one tangible gain which the Russians held after their May offensive waned.

The Kharkov action was local in its immediate purpose and effect; it was not. the major Nazi offensive which the world still awaited. Berlin stated the simple fact when a communique called the Kharkov advance an action to "straighten the lines."

North of Moscow, on the Kalinin front, the Nazis and Russians pinched at each other, trying to straighten the innumerable kinks and interlacing niches in each other's lines which resulted from local winter skirmishes and infiltrations. Before either side can launch a major drive, it must try to eliminate the other's outlying positions.

Above Leningrad the Luftwaffe stepped up its attacks on Murmansk. Object: to close that port of entry for war goods from Britain and the U.S. This effort, too, was an obvious preparation for the summer offensive. The fact that it occurred at the northern terminus of the vast front, 2,000 miles from Sevastopol, did not turn wise eyes from the south. For the immutable, basic fact of Hitler's war remained. He must have oil, and the two points where he showed his greatest strength last week׫evastopol and Kharkov--are on the road to the oil of the Caucasus.

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