World Battlefronts: EASTERN FRONT: Into the Belly

While the western Allies cut toward the head and heart of the dying German dragon, the Red Army sliced up into its belly. Austria, the land whence Adolf Hitler sprang, was invaded.

Red-starred tanks of Marshals Fedor I. Tolbukhin and Rodion Y. Malinovsky knifed nearer Vienna, the old Habsburg capital where the Nazi Führer first paraded as a conqueror. They reached Wiener-Neustadt, bomb-battered center through which supplies flow to Germans in Yugoslavia and Italy. The great Austrian and Czechoslovakian industries, which at the end of 1944 were supplying some 60% of German war production, were threatened.

Tolbukhin's tanks surged across the plains of western Hungary, captured the rail center of Szombathely, then outflanked the Nazi positions southeast of the shallow lake called the Sea of Vienna to plunge into the Austrian province of Burgenland. On both sides of the Danube and northward in Slovakia, Malinovsky's troops fought toward the Bratislava Gap and Vienna.

Meanwhile, on the Berlin front, Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov held great armies poised for the final smash to join with his allies coming in from the west.

Marshal Alexander M. Vasilevsky cleaned up the largest of the East Prussian pockets and drove with four armies on Königsberg. Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovsky took Danzig, first city to fall to the Germans on the first day of World War II. Other Russian troops stormed into Gdynia and found 9,000 dispirited Germans lined up on the docks, waiting to be evacuated on ships that never came in.