Word: smolensk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cannon rolled. They boomed for countless men grey from the foe. In Berlin Nazi spokesmen babbled of "evading actions" and "elastic defense." But the grim face of the war map uttered the word they would not: retreat. All along the 700-mile fluid front, from the forests of Smolensk to the Sea of Azov, the Wehrmacht was falling back in what might yet be its worst defeat. Nazi bastions which a month ago were safely in the rear were now in peril. Taganrog, Yelnya, Sumy and Konotop had fallen. Smolensk, Poltava, Mariupol and Stalino (which Berlin once possessively hailed...
...Army's ablest tacticians. His myaso-roobka (meat-grinder) concept has dominated Soviet military thought since 1941, has bled Germany white of her young manhood. Sokolovsky's antidote for Blitzkrieg is slow, continuous grinding, a Verdun multiplied a hundredfold. The advance on Smolensk delights him; only two years ago he had trod this very road in retreat...
...Bryansk falls, the Red Army can turn northwest toward Smolensk, the nerve center of the German defense sys tem on the central front. In the Nazi-owned Stockholm Dagsposten a Berlin correspondent reported: If the German Army is unable to hold the Russian advance, Germany will collapse. Not only Red soldiers but the Nazis were beginning to see the maiden's light...
...Soviet system. He learned his fighting in World War I, in the civil wars of 1918-20 and in the Russo-Polish campaign of 1920. In Frunze Military Academy, nursery of Soviet generals, he studied tank and air warfare. The priestly-looking Rokossovsky fought in the great battle of Smolensk in July 1941, which was a Pyrrhic victory for the Germans. He learned the essence of German tactics the hard way, and how to parry them. "By studying German tactics we changed our own method of attack and step by step inflicted increasing losses...
...Objectives. The Russian push toward Bryansk, if successful, would open the path to Smolensk as well as yield the Russians control over the six main rail roads radiating from Bryansk. The pincers movement converging on Kharkov threat ens the German-occupied Donets basin, most valuable prize of the Nazis in Russia...