Word: vitebsk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
June 23, as the Russians smash the last Finnish front along the Svir River, they begin their drive directly westward, from Vitebsk toward Warsaw...
...stage was set in Poland and the cast was in the wings. The Russian-German front from East Prussia to the Carpathians bore a strong resemblance to the Vitebsk front just before Joseph Stalin's armies launched their great summer offensive in June. There were the same signs this week that Russia was accumulating tremendous reservoirs of new power behind the line, the same enemy fretfulness over blows that the Germans could see and feel were coming...
Loose at the Seams. A persistent lateral stretching of the fighting front is a painful business for an enemy holding undermanned positions. In the east, the Russians had pulled the Germans apart at the seams by extending the active front from a 200-mile jump-off line around Vitebsk to the present long reach between the Baltic and the Carpathians. The Anglo-U.S. armies could not do this on the narrow Italian peninsula. But they could do as well by an over-water leap to France, bypassing the Gothic Line and the Alps. In effect, this created...
...first 38 days of their onslaught, the Russians pushed their enemy out of 110,000 square miles. Every hour, on the average, they had swept over 121 square miles. In 38 days the Russians claimed to have killed and captured more than a half million German troops. From Vitebsk to Warsaw, they had traveled more than halfway to Berlin...
...first week of the great push, five major Nazi strongholds fell: after Vitebsk (which had withstood two fierce Red assaults in the past year), Orsha, Mogilev, Bobruisk, Zhlobin. Nothing like this, in so short a time, had ever happened to the Wehrmacht before...