World Battlefronts: EASTERN FRONT: Trouble Trebled

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For four weeks the Germans had nervously watched as Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov beefed up a tremendous force for the assault aimed at Berlin. The Germans had time to do something: build a deep line of entrenchments and "kettles" (Red Army slang for German "hedgehogs") back of the Oder and Neisse Rivers, at which the Russians had halted. The Germans could do something else: concentrate against Zhukov's most threatening thrust, aimed at Stettin. They had good kettles in the Stargard area.

Zhukov also could do something. Where the Germans were not watching so intently, he built up an explosive force east and north of Stargard. Last week he touched it off as part of a double blast. When the smoke had cleared, the stunned Germans found that the Russians were on the Baltic at two points and had lanced Pomerania into three segments, accomplishing a vast double encirclement. The probable result: destruction of the 200-mile Pomeranian and Polish Corridor front, from which the Germans might have launched an attack on the Russians' long northern flank.

Zhukov had apparently caught the enemy by surprise at a point where he had no deep defenses. Russian tank rumbled straight north, covered 62 miles in four days and came up to the Baltic dunes near Kolberg. Zhukov had timed his drive with a Baltic-bound thrust of Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky; the timing was perfect. Rokossovsky's forces simultaneously burst into Koslin, 24 miles east of Kolberg, then fanned out eastward more than 20 miles along the sea.

The Russian blasts had ripped through Pomerania's roads and rails, cutting off perhaps 200,000 German troops in the 8,200-plus square mile area east of Kolberg. Zhukov had trebled German trouble.