Limited Attack

When the Germans last week abandoned Vyazma on the Smolensk front (see map), they said that they were merely shortening their lines. That had been the explanation for withdrawals in the Donets area, too, and yet last week the Germans busily lengthened their lines there (see p. 25). "Line-shortening" could no longer be taken seriously as an excuse for retreats.

The departure from Vyazma was evidently imposed on the Germans. The Russians claimed to have found in the town 83 tanks, 69 guns, 222 machine guns, 565 trucks and tractors, 57 locomotives, 515 wagons. The Germans admitted leaving 59 burned-out broad-gauge locomotives, two motor vehicle "cemeteries" and 200 destroyed freight cars--all said to be Russian.

As for the Russians, they had not developed any vast strategy of offense in the Smolensk area. They advanced frontally. Towns fell in order. No big encirclements seemed to be going on.

The Russian objective on this front apparently was to push the Germans back from their springboards before Moscow and the great system of rail, highway and water communications which radiates from the capital. The eventual importance of this drive depended more on German plans than on the immediate scale of the Russian attacks. If the Wehrmacht hoped to strike again at Moscow and central Russia this year, the Red Army's gain and the German loss were enormous. If the Germans had already abandoned such hopes, and intended only to hold some tenable line in central Russia, the successive losses of Rzhev and Vyazma, and even the looming threat to Smolensk, did not matter so much to them.

Any vastly ambitious Russian scheme on the Smolensk front would probably entail strong flanking rushes--logically in the Staraya Russa and Orel areas. Although there had been local offensives at those two points for some weeks, they seemed to be spent.

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