Word: sevastopol
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...year ago a powerful German siege army, reinforced to 14 divisions, for the third and last time in eight months attacked the Russian naval base of Sevastopol. Not long after the assault began, a young playwright, Boris Voyetekhov, arrived as special correspondent for Pravda. His book (The Last Days of Sevastopol; Knopf; $2.50) on Sevastopol's final struggle, tells the story of one of the great delaying actions that have defeated German strategy in Russia...
...hell created by the Germans at Sevastopol came in the midst of the lovely, flower-scented early Black Sea summer, the season when in the old days the nobility, in the new days the people of Russia had taken their vacations along that coast. Voyetekhov gives a paradisal picture of the peace he left behind him in the Caucasus: "Beside whitewashed, tin-roofed houses, on cottage chairs under cherry trees, were sitting the most beautiful Russian women-Kuban Cossacks." Voyetekhov went into Sevastopol aboard a destroyer at night, finding the half-wrecked city in flames. Milling around the dock were...
...restriction had been put on what could be transported. Even plants were allowed. Only in this way could the stubborn reluctance of the people of Sevastopol to leave their beloved city be broken down. . . . The Navy understood this, and with solicitude sailors carried up the gangway ancient models of sailing ships, knickknacks, family portraits framed in lifebelts, old seascapes." When the destroyer left, before dawn, Voyetekhov went underground to Naval headquarters, nerve center of the defense. Among the activities directed there was a system of salvage from sunken supply ships in the harbor. Divers were sent out every night...
...only trouble with this incident is that by the author's own account it could scarcely have occurred. Ships brought supplies into Sevastopol and unloaded them; the empty ships took women & children...
...such as that a body of the defenders on the south fought their way past Balaclava and into the Crimean hills to join the partisans; that the last handful of defenders on the north dove into the sea and swam toward death when their ammunition was gone; that ruined Sevastopol had a quisling named Vasily Nikitin, appointed "Burgomaster" by the Germans. It is more illuminating to know that Voyetekhov found "No pasarán," the motto of Madrid, scrawled on a wall in Sevastopol; that "Snakes!" is an exclamation of Russian soldiers; that Russian bureaucracy is detached enough to allow...