Word: smolensk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Smolensk is a dead city like Pompeii. ... En route we saw burning villages and forests aflame, and more farmhouses destroyed. With the exception of one bank and one hotel, Smolensk was completely destroyed, with all houses burned down, streets blown up, railway cars, trams, autobusses wrecked...
...Swiss correspondents wrote this collaborative impression (not entirely corroborated by photographs) of Smolensk after visiting the city last week as guests of the German Army. The Germans claimed they had entered Smolensk on July 16. Last week, 29 days later, the Russians admitted they had evacuated it. In that month, in and around that dying city, had been fought the greatest pitched battle of World War II, perhaps of all time...
...will take historians years to reconstruct the Battle of Smolensk shot by shot. But it is already possible to reconstruct its general outlines. For the Russian plan of defense was based on a single document-a field manual designated as PU-36, which was drawn up in 1936 by Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, then Vice Commissar of Defense. It was his last great service to the Red Army. He was executed in the purge a year later...
Line or No Line? Fortnight ago a Russian communique denied that a Stalin Line "ever existed, or exists." In the sense of a continuous line, like the Maginot, none existed. But in the Smolensk area, blocking the traditional military highroad to Moscow-between the Dnieper and Dvina Rivers-the Russians had translated PU-36 into concrete and steel terms...
...Battle. German Intelligence had also studied PU-36. Reconnaissance had looked over the Smolensk area. In posthumous tribute to Marshal Tukhachevsky, the German commander in this area, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, decided to abandon the fundamental pattern of Blitzkrieg -cutting as if with a knife through one strategic spot (as at Sedan) and then encircling. Instead he dug in, as if with a gigantic fork, sending five parallel prongs into the defense area. Each pair of prongs had to reduce island after island between them...