World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF RUSSIA: Summer Has Come

Like a monster warmed by the summer sun, the Nazi stirred. Along the Russian front, from the Black Sea to Leningrad, the shape, and probable direction, of his summer thrust emerged:

> At Sevastopol the Germans still strove to finish that fortress, thereby clearing the way to control of the Black Sea and an advance into the upper Caucasus.

> Near Kharkov, 400 miles to the north, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's tight teams of planes, tanks, guns and men punched a dent, then tried to hack a great pocket in Marshal Semion Timoshenko's defenses. Eventually, if the Nazi plan worked, the pocket would become an ever-enlarging fissure.

> From Nazi-held Kursk, 125 miles north of Kharkov, the German armies also struck at the deep Russian defenses, with a blow so violent that London called it the real beginning of the Nazi summer offensive.

> At Volkhovo, 80 miles southeast of Leningrad, where incessant and uncertain struggles have been reported for weeks, the Germans claimed a victory: 32,000 Russian prisoners and much booty. Whatever the true outcome, a preliminary to major engagements in the north had apparently been completed.

All these related actions constituted a concerted effort to gnaw through the successive layers of Russia's front-wide defense-in-depth. For the Russians, the most disturbing sign was Timoshenko's seeming lack of enough equipment to turn the German tactics near Kharkov to his advantage. Given ample arms, he was in ideal position to smash Bock's advancing forces by simultaneous attack from all sides of the pocket. Perhaps Moscow was holding its fire for a larger crisis at Kursk; perhaps Timoshenko preferred to wait until the Kharkov pocket was deeper, the Germans more vulnerable. But last week, when he wanted to attack by air at the upper edge of the pocket, he had to shuttle planes from the south, then quickly return them to the threatened Izyum sector.

Immediately at stake in the Kursk and Kharkov fighting was the important Moscow-Rostov railway, which not only supplies the Russian armies along a vast front south of Moscow, but leads to the Caucasus and its oil. If the Germans cut this railroad, as they did last year when they briefly held Rostov, they will be well on their way to the Caucasus. And, on their way to the railway, they will have to inflict great defeats on the Red Army—the only kind of defeats which can win the summer campaign for Hitler. This week those defeats were still to be inflicted; the Red Army's deep, intricately fortified lines had bent, but they had not crumbled.

Somewhere ahead of the Germans was an even bigger objective than Russia itself: an effort to squeeze the Middle and Near East in mighty pincers. This prospect was still far from reality, but it was near and dark enough to bring Kharkov and Kursk very close to Cairo in the total focus of World War II.

City of Faith

To the company of heroes of World War II, the world added the defenders of Sevastopol. With the accounts of rotting German dead, of incessant tank and plane attack, of slow German advances, came stories of life within the city.