Word: smolensk
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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...
Early this week that outcome may have been foreshadowed by the German High Command-vastly more reliable than the official Nazi D.N.B. news agency-which claimed that the chief Russian forces in the center around Smolensk had been "destroyed." Russia admitted that a powerful German pincer thrust toward Kiev had reached Belaya Tserkov, 60 miles southwest of the city...
Test of Strategy. Since July 16 Russia claimed to have beaten off 42 attacks on Smolensk, which Napoleon grabbed from strategic retreaters in one day. This Russian decision to stand and counterattack, however it turns out, will undoubtedly be credited to Stalin. But his chief military adviser is Vice Commissar of Defense, Marshal Boris Mikhailovich Shaposhnikov (Joseph Stalin himself is now self-appointed Commissar...