World Battlefronts: MEN AT WAR: A Hero Falls in Action

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Of all the Red Army's marshals and generals, none has been a more dramatic figure, few have been more popular with their men and the Russian public alike than barrel-chested, black-haired Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky. He combined many characteristics that Russians love: energy, muscular strength, stubborn calm, youthful daring, earthiness. He was up from the black soil, a worker's son, an orphan at nine, a shepherd in the Ukraine, a cadet at Kiev Military School, a total product of the Soviet state.

At 37 Chernyakhovsky was the youngest Army general. A colonel at the war's beginning, he became one of the Red Army's top tank strategists. He scored notable victories over the Germans at Kursk, Voronezh, Tarnopol, Vitebsk. He was Kiev's liberator. His troops (he commanded more than 500,000) were the first to set foot on German soil—in East Prussia. There, in the current offensive, his and Marshal Rokossovsky's men had taken all but 700 of that province's 14,300 square miles.

There, this week, General Ivan Chernyakhovsky died of a battle wound. The Russian "soldier's soldier," he was often at the front, taking risks no Allied Army commander is supposed to take. Moscow ordered a hero's funeral at Vilna, a grant and annuities to his widow and two children, a monument to honor a twice-named Hero of the Soviet Union.