For Whom the Guns Roll

Once again the red cannon rolled. They boomed for countless men grey from the foe. In Berlin Nazi spokesmen babbled of "evading actions" and "elastic defense." But the grim face of the war map uttered the word they would not: retreat. All along the 700-mile fluid front, from the forests of Smolensk to the Sea of Azov, the Wehrmacht was falling back in what might yet be its worst defeat. Nazi bastions which a month ago were safely in the rear were now in peril. Taganrog, Yelnya, Sumy and Konotop had fallen. Smolensk, Poltava, Mariupol and Stalino (which Berlin once possessively hailed as "Russia's Essen") awaited the Red blow. For many, the blow might come within days.

The cannon of Moscow also rolled for the leaders--the seven hard, able, aggressive men in command of the seven active fronts. Five of them had proved their mettle in the battle for Stalingrad. On all chests but two glistened the Order of Suvorov, First Class, which Stalin last January awarded to 23 of his best generals. The seven:

1) Colonel General Vassily Sokolovsky, the captor of Yelnya. A husky, keen-faced, long-nosed man, he is one of the Red Army's ablest tacticians. His myaso-roobka (meat-grinder) concept has dominated Soviet military thought since 1941, has bled Germany white of her young manhood. Sokolovsky's antidote for Blitzkrieg is slow, continuous grinding, a Verdun multiplied a hundredfold. The advance on Smolensk delights him; only two years ago he had trod this very road in retreat.

2) Army General Markian Popov, the captor of Karachev. The Red Command regards this tall, thin, long-necked man with a schoolboy's face as one of the most daring of its young generals; it has jumped him two grades since April. A tank expert, he won his spurs fighting the Japanese in 1939. Some two years later his columns decimated the Italian Army in the Don loop, continued to race into the Ukraine until they bogged down in the mud and ran out of fuel. The Red Command forgave him. When the hour struck for the summer offensive, Popov received command of the crucial Bryansk front.

3) Army General Konstantin Rokossovsky, captor of Sevsk. This blue-eyed, blond giant is one of the Red Army's most brilliant field commanders and leading candidate for a marshal's baton (TIME, Aug. 23). His greatest personal triumph was also the greatest victory thus far in World War II: the capture of Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus and 330,000 Nazis at Stalingrad.

4) Army General Nikolai Vatutin, captor of Sumy and co-captor of Kharkov. A massive man with a peasant's round face, he is one of the Red Army's veteran tankmen. In World War I he was a private. The Civil War gave him an opportunity to display his talents, saw him rise to the command of a cavalry division. Today his soldiers rate Vatutin as a "driving general," recall with awe last winter's campaign, when with fury and disdain for physical suffering he hurled his men into attack in the fiercest blizzards until the Nazi defenses in the Don loop crumbled.

5) Colonel General Ivan Konev, captor of Kharkov. A hard-faced man with a leathery skin and a head as bare as a billiard ball, he is one of the dwindling number of oldtimers who survived the test of this war. Like Popov, he headed an army in the Far East before the war. When Hitler struck, Konev was in the vital Gomel sector, fighting stubbornly for each foot of the muddy terrain. In the battle for Moscow, he held the southern anchor of the defense line, soundly drubbed the renowned Nazi tankman, Colonel General Heinz Guderian. Marshal Zhukov once said of him: "Let Konev play his own game under his own rules, and no German will ever get the better of him." Said Konev to his officers: "Make up your mind what the enemy expects you to do and then do the opposite." Konev is a member of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union, and is Stalin's friend.

6) Army General Rodion Malinovsky, co-captor of Kharkov. At 44, this stocky, Odessa-born general is a veteran of much bloodshed. In World War I he fought in France beside American troops. In World War II he achieved a major triumph by crushing the Wehrmacht's desperate attempt to relieve the army trapped at Stalingrad. Today his is the crucial job of clamping the lid on the Germans caught in the southern rattrap. The Red Army regards him as a subtle and original tactician, second only to Rokossovsky as a daring and two-fisted field commander.

7) Colonel General Fedor Tolbnkhin, captor of Taganrog. A huge man with a heavy, calm, intelligent face, he is the septet's least-known member. One of five army chiefs who helped to trap Friedrich von Paulus, Tolbukhin this year jumped two grades within four months. Equally adept in the use of cavalry and tanks, he used both last month to punch holes in the German defenses in the south. Last week he stage-managed a "little Stalin-grad" at Taganrog.

Tolbukhin's victory was the reward of daring. After a gap was torn in the Nazi lines north of Taganrog, his tanks and Cossacks rushed in, then wheeled south towards the sea. Other units, meanwhile, stormed Taganrog's front gates. When the din of battle died down, 35,000 Nazi corpses littered the steppe, 5,100 dejected survivors straggled into prisoner pens.

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