Red Friday

Friday's dawn on the rolling plain of south Poland was like many of the month before--a grey blending of snowy night with snowy day. On their side of the line west of the Vistula, the Germans huddled in their trenches and guessed that this Friday would be just another day of wary waiting. No planes would fly. The earth was still soft and sticky.

On the Red Army's side of the line, small units of troops crouched expectantly, their long rifles bayonet-tipped. Then they moved stealthily out into the haze, as many a patrol squad had done before. But they were more than patrols.

Some of the first wave reached the first German lines. More of the second wave did, then more & more. The quiet of morning broke in a flurry of gunfire from the second and third German trench systems.

Then, like a volcano blowing off its top, the whole Russian line exploded in a huge arc of gunfire. Wily, broad-jawed Marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev had touched off the greatest mass artillery shoot ever staged for a Russian attack.

Along every mile of the 25-mile sector he had chosen to smash, Marshal Konev had lined 300 to 400 guns--long-barreled giants, stubby, deep-throated howitzers, crackling light fieldpieces. On row upon row of U.S.-made trucks were batteries of Katushas, the rocket-projecting pride of Soviet artillerymen.

Red Comets. For two hours the hurricane of steel roared and whooshed, the Katushas arching crimson-tailed comets through its center. Then it was noon. The crescendo fell to a deep drumlike rumble. White-clad infantrymen moved out ahead of white-painted tanks, self-propelled guns.

Dusk came early. When the grey day darkened, the infantrymen and tanks had crunched over the first two lines of deep German defenses. Parts of these lines had melted away in the storm of fire. The Russians told of trenches "piled high" with German dead. Where Germans had lived through the storm the Russians found them stunned.

Fighting raged through the night on the approaches to the third line, the main bulwark the Germans had erected in five months of quiet. A wide belt of mines protected it, and along it were earthworks and pillboxed guns--25 to 40 of them to each mile. The Katushas and guns spoke again. Flamethrowers spat at the strong points until their timbered linings blazed. By dusk on Saturday Marshal Konev knew that he had what he wanted: a definite break through the deep German line.

Road to Silesia. On Saturday night Moscow broke out its own fire for the first time in many weeks. Twenty salvos from 224 guns saluted Konev's offensive. Marshal Stalin hailed an initial victory--an advance of 25 miles on the sector 100 miles south of Warsaw.

By this week the Red Army onslaught was in the full stride of a grand assault, gaining momentum and widening the advance. The Russians had pierced 40 miles, had spread their break to a width of 65 miles. They had taken their first prize: Kielce (pop. 58,000), a hub of roads and railways 20 miles west of the point where Konev stopped last August after he had bloodily won his Vistula bridgehead.

At one point the Russians had surged over the Nida River, the last formidable water barrier before Cracow. Only 40 miles beyond that ancient fortress of Poland's kings are the industrial towns on Germany's Silesian border.

If the Germans had been expecting the blow to fall where it did, they were not expecting its massive force. Adolf Hitler himself had reportedly called the Russian grip on the Vistula "a pistol pointed at the heart of the German empire." When Konev pressed the trigger, Berlin agonized: "Stalin's aim is to shatter the entire German east front." Berlin reported two other Soviet blows: 1) in East Prussia, where the Russians had twice been turned back; 2) in the Carpathians along the Hungary-Slovakia border, about 125 miles south of Konev's drive and 100 miles northeast of strangled Budapest.

Road to Berlin. Moscow kept silent about these fronts, but there was no doubt in Allied councils that they were a part of the winter offensive, that Russia had finally girded its full strength to crush Germany in 1945.

Konev had timed his blow smartly--when the Germans were committing more forces in a futile attempt to rescue Budapest, to hold back the Red menace to Bratislava and Vienna. The reported move in East Prussia (the Germans said 37-year-old General Ivan Chernyakhovsky had attacked heavily in two salients) and the push in the Carpathians were in the Red Army's strategic pattern of corollary drives linked to the main blow. Konev's offensive, if successful, would create a great bulge in Poland, but it would be vulnerable to attacks cutting in on its flanks from north or south--unless the enemy were also heavily engaged there. The Russian command was not making a Rundstedt gamble.

The Russians had created still another worry for the Germans. There was now only one long front in the east from which they could borrow men and machines. That was the front immediately above & below Warsaw. There the Germans had always feared the mortal Russian blow--at the shortest distance from Berlin. There the Germans reported Red Army stirrings. There the Red Army would press another trigger, perhaps explode the whole 600-mile front into flaming action.

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