Word: azov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Warm winds from the southwest blew across the southern Ukraine last week. From Kharkov to the Sea of Azov the snow began to melt and the rich black earth steamed. Red Army men took off their cloth helmets and marched bareheaded. Tankers lifted their turrets and breathed lungfuls of the fresh, clean...
Elastic defense can be masterful, as Rommel's retreat to Tunisia was, or merely chaotic. The Russians had two chances of making it chaotic-they could drive south through Stalin to the Sea of Azov, pocketing the routed defenders of Rostov, and west from Lozovaya to the Dnieper bend at Dniepropetrovsk, cutting the Caucasian remnant and Crimean garrisons off from convenient retreat by rail or good roads...
This week one column of Vatutin's army, rolling south, was within 100 miles of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, thereby threatening to block the Wehrmacht's retreat from Rostov. There is a chance that before spring the Wehrmacht may lose all of the rich Donets basin west to the Dnieper River-the last natural defense line inside Russia...
...Caucasus the story was the same. Two swift Russian smashes wedged some 200,000 Germans under Field Marshal Siegmund Wilhelm Walther List into a narrow strip along the Black Sea and Sea of Azov north of Novorossiisk. At week's end the Russians said that, by taking Yeisk on the Sea of Azov, they had closed the Germans' last channels of escape via Rostov. There were reports of the Red Fleet's harrying boatloads of Germans fleeing across the narrow (3 mi.) Kerch Straits to the Axis-held Crimea. The most the Nazis could hope...
With the limited time available for reaching these goals, the Germans had to make all possible preparations in advance of their great offensive. All along the 2,000-mile front, from Murmansk to the Sea of Azov, innumerable local chores of war have been done. The World has heard echoes of these preparatory struggles in the news from the Kharkov front last month, in the tidings of skirmishes and minor battles last week below Leningrad, on the Moscow front, in the Kalinin area near Smolensk west of the capital, below Kharkov where the Nazis advanced. Greatest of them...