The Southland Times TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1942. Russia Fights On
IT IS now 11 weeks since the German forces began to converge on Stalingrad, and for the last four weeks the city itself has been the battleground. During this period words like “critical,” “serious,” “grave” and even “desperate,” as applied to the position of the defenders, have been robbed of all their meaning. The situation of Stalingrad was critical 11 weeks ago; but since then the city has survived crisis after crisis, and it still holds out today. It has become the scene of one of the most bloody and ferocious battles of history. Scores of thousands of soldiers have gone to their death in its streets and suburbs: one estimate has placed the German losses alone at 23,000 a week killed and 170,000 a week wounded. The enemy has long since been forced to abandon his carefullyprepared plan for a convergence on the city from the north-west and the south-west. He has been compelled to undertake a direct frontal attack from the west, and to suffer the enormous expenditure of men and materials which this has involved. According to one correspondent, the struggle has already cost the Nazis 10 times as many lives and machines as they expected. They have bombed the city ceaselessly and blasted it with artillery fire. Even people who have seen pictures and read descriptions of the devastation of Rotterdam and Cologne, or of the battlegrounds at Kharkov and Smolensk will he appalled by eye-witness accounts of the struggle for Stalingrad. Here is one of them, by a correspondent of The Times (London): “Through clouds of dust and the rubble of shattered houses German infantrymen, armed with tommy-guns, filter through the. Russian lines. Every pile of stones, every crater in the broad streets, every window in the scarred houses is a point of resistance. . . The Germans are using 100 planes at a time to blast a lane for their tanks and infantry. Houses are torn asunder, streets collapse and fronts of factories slide off like falling shutters. “This city, which Russia has seen with pride grow round the core of old Tsaritsyn, and from which poured machines to cultivate and harvest the Russian earth, has now become . a smoky cauldron in which two armies grapple for mastery. The Russian is fighting on his very doorstep; he is crouched behind domestic furniture. Vicious anti-tank rifles protrude from windows stuffed with mattresses. Sappers are laying mines in cellars redolent with the acrid scent of fresh-cut birch logs. Russians and Germans fight a grotesque gangster warfare in workers’ homes.” Tribute to Red Army
The prolongation of Russian resistance, in conditions like these, is a magnificent tribute to the morale, the toughness and the fighting skill of the Red Army. The Soviet troops have no triumphant successes in the field to look back upon. For them, the war has been one long retreat, broken only by periods of heroic resistance at a chain of strong points extending from the Polish border to Leningrad in the north and Stalingrad and Mosdok in the south. They have seen some of the richest areas of their country laid waste, and 60,000,000 of their people pass under German rule. They have lost at least 5,000,000 of their comrades-in-arms, dead, wounded or missing. And they face a powerful and ruthless enemy,, better equipped than they are themselves. It is almost unbelievable that in such .circumstances they could maintain the resistance that they have and continue fighting today as grimly and resolutely as in the first few months of the war. 'They must be heartened by the fact that the Germans are on the defensive at all points on the front which extends 1200 miles north of Stalingrad. At the key-points of Voronej, Riev and Leningrad the Russians have made clear gains. On all of these widely-separated fronts there is not the slightest evidence of any preparations for a Russian withdrawal to a strictly defensive line beyond the Volga and north of Archangel. Such a project would involve largescale readjustments in the Moscow and Leningrad sectors, but the Soviet forces are attacking in these zones instead of contemplating withdrawal. If it is true that Hitler has commissioned his master-planner, Halder, to prepare for a winter campaign, such a decision would only be in accord with the present military situation, in spite of the peril of Stalingrad and the threat to the Caucasus. For the quality of the Soviet resistance at Stalingrad shows that the Germans are still far from accomplishing the principal aim of their campaign in the east—the elimination of the Russian armies as a major factor in the war. Even if they captured Stalingrad and reached the Caspian, thus splitting the Red Army and depriving the northern forces of much of their oil, . they would still have to attempt the capture of the Leningrad and Moscow industrial areas and the severing of the northern supply route through Murmansk and Vologda. There is no longer time for these campaigns in the present year. The Russian winter has not yet made itself felt in the south, but in the north conditions must already be difficult. Barring some extraordinary change of fortune, it is now possible to believe that the Red Army will survive all the trials of the next two months and will again be a powerful and active force in the spring. By that time it will have accomplished its great purpose, and help will be at hand.
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Southland Times, Issue 24873, 13 October 1942, Page 4
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914The Southland Times TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1942. Russia Fights On Southland Times, Issue 24873, 13 October 1942, Page 4
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