Word: smolensk
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...Captured Yartsevo, the strongest barrier on the road to Smolensk, and Nezhin, the last strong barrier on the road to Kiev...
Goals. With its armies, as the week turned, within eight mi. of Melitopol, within 20 mi. of the Dnieper, 25 mi. of Smolensk, 35 mi. of Kiev and 115 mi. of the old Polish border, Moscow remained closemouthed. Yet the war maps spelled clearly the Red Army's immediate objectives: Smolensk, Kiev, the Dnieper, the Crimea...
...Smolensk was the goal of two big armies, headed by Colonel General Andrei Yeremenko, hero of Stalingrad, and Army General Vassily Sokolovsky. After their forces cracked six lines of steel and concrete, Moscow commented jubilantly: "[The line] which closed the so-called Smolensk Gate has been broken...
...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...