On the Kisalfold

The Germans had hoped to make another Stalingrad of stately, romantic Budapest. The city was a natural fortress in the first major defense line of Germany's deep backyard. The heights of Buda, rising some 770 feet above the Danube, commanded the approaches to Pest. The Germans had time to rim the city with strong points. The 950-foot river itself was a formidable last ditch. The Germans had men and machines. The Russians had to bring both over a tenuous supply line that looped far around the Carpathians.

This week the flames of Budapest lighted a major German failure and another pressing predicament for the German command. The first formidable backyard gate was all but battered down. But Budapest did not alone represent the problem. The Red Army had already gone beyond that victory. In effect it had two great victories in one.

Before Budapest's fate was sealed, the month and a half battle for it had also become the battle for the Kisalfoeld, the triangular "Little Plain" of western Hungary, with Vienna, in Austria, as its apex. By this week the Russians had won a series of battles for the Kisalfoeld's approaches, stood upon it on both sides of the Danube. Vienna, the inner gate to Germany's back door, was now the German worry.

In Budapest the Germans fought to the bitter end long after it had become tactically unimportant. How much the city had suffered was not told, but it could not have escaped vast damage. The first of the satellite capitals to feel war's destruction, it stood this week as a monument to the Germans' readiness to sacrifice somebody else's possessions, and to the Russians' complexity of attack.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.