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presents
Soviet Writers at War!
IN THE MAIN LINE OF ATTACK
by
Vasili Grossman
A report from Stalingrad, 1942
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 During the Great Patriotic War, Vasili Grossman was a correspondent for the army
newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. As such, he
was an eye-witness to and participant in the historic Battle
of Stalingrad. Years later, in his novels For
A Just Cause and Life and Fate, Grossman would present a somewhat
controversial view of that battle. But in 1942, his views were less
ambiguous, celebrating the unquestionable courage of Soviet troops and
highlighting the horrors of this hideous war.
In the Main Line of Attack describes life and death in a division of
Siberian troops who had to bear the brunt of the most frenzied period of
Nazi attacks on Stalingrad, withstanding 80 straight hours of bombardment,
and more.
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 In
the night, Colonel Gurtiev's Siberian troops took
up defensive positions. A factory always looks rather stark and gloomy, but one could surely find no scene in the
world more gloomy than the one these men saw on that October morning in 1942:
the dark mass of the workshops, the wet, gleaming rails, already rusted here
and there, the wrecked goods wagons, the piles of steel tubes scattered
around the vast yard, as large as a city square, the brown slag heaps and
mounds of coal, the great factory pipes, damaged in many places by enemy
shells. The asphalted yard was pock-marked with bomb craters and scattered everywhere were steel splinters torn
off by explosions, like thin shreds of material. The Division was to take up
positions in front of the plant and stand to the death. Behind was the cold, dark Volga.
During the night the sappers broke up the asphalt and dug trenches with picks
in the hard, stony ground, cut firing-holes in the strong walls of the
workshops, and made shelters in the cellars of the ruined buildings. The
Barricades Plant was to be defended by Markelov's
and Mikhalyev's regiments. One of the command posts
was set up in a concrete-lined canal that passed beneath the main workshops. Sergeyenko's regiment was defending the deep ravine which
ran down to the Volga through the Barricades
Garden City. The officers and men of the regiment called it the Ravine of Death. Yes, behind was the
dark, icy-cold Volga, behind
was the fate of Russia.
The Division was to make a stand and fight
to the death.
The First World War was a terrible ordeal for Russia, but then the fiendish foe
had had to divide his forces between the Eastern and the Western fronts. In
this war the whole crushing weight of
the German invasion had fallen on Russia. In January 1941
the German armies were advancing along the entire front stretching from sea
to sea. This year, 1942, the Germans were concentrating their attack in the
south-eastern direction. What in the First World War had been spread over two
fronts manned by several great powers, what last year struck Russia alone along a two-thousand-mile front,
crashed down this summer and autumn on Stalingrad and the Caucasus.
Moreover, here in Stalingrad the Germans had
renewed their onslaught on the northern and central districts of the city.
The Germans showered the murderous
fire of countless mortars and thousands of guns on the northern part
of the city, on the industrial area in the center of which stood the
Barricades Plant. The Germans reckoned that no human being could stand up to
such punishment, that no hearts or nerves in the world could fail to crack up
in that inferno of fire, screaming
metal, quaking earth and seething air. The whole fiendish arsenal of
German militarism was concentrated here--tanks and flame-throwers, six-barrel
mortars, armadas of dive-bombers with wailing sirens, and personnel and
demolition bombs. The tommy-gunners were supplied
with explosive bullets, the artillery and mortar teams with incendiary
shells. Every kind of German artillery was concentrated here from
small-caliber anti-tank guns to heavy, long-range pieces. They fired mortar
shells that looked like harmless green and red balls, and air torpedoes, that
made craters the size of a two-story house. Here the night was as bright as day from the glow of fires and rockets,
while in the day-time it was dark as night with the smoke from burning houses
and the German smoke-screens. The din was as solid as the earth
itself, and the brief moments of silence seemed more terrible and threatening
than the din of battle. And if the whole world bows its head to the heroism
of the Russian armies, if the Russian armies speak in pious tones of the
defenders of Stalingrad, here in Stalingrad
itself, Shumilov's men say with deep respect:
"It's not us. The lads who are holding the plants, they're the ones.
It's an awesome sight: there's a solid cloud of fire and smoke and German
dive-bombers above them day and night, but Chuikov's
still holding out."
These are grim words for a soldier; "the
line of the main attack" are grave, terrible
words. There are no more terrible words in war, and it was naturally
no accident that the men of Gurtiev's Siberian
Division were sent on that dismal autumn day to defend the plant. The Siberians are tough, sturdy people, used to
cold and privation, fond of discipline and order, reticent and gruff.
The Siberians are solid .and reliable. In tight-lipped silence they struck at
the stony ground with their picks, cutting firing-holes in the workshop walls,
making dugouts, entrenchments and communication trenches, preparing for the fight to the death.
Colonel Gurtiev is a lean man of fifty. When the
First World War broke out in 1914 he left the St. Petersburg Polytechnic
where he was studying in his second year to volunteer for the army, and
fought as a gunner at Warsaw, Baranovichi and Chartoriisk.
Gurtiev has been in the army for twenty-eight
years, seeing active service and training officers. His two sons went off to
the front as lieutenants. He has left his wife and daughter behind in far-away Omsk. On this terrible and solemn
day he thought of his lieutenant sons, his daughter and his wife, and the
many young officers he had trained, and his whole long, hard, Spartan life. The time has come when all
the principles of military science, morale and duty which he taught his sons,
his pupils and fellow soldiers will be put to the test, and he looked
anxiously at the faces of the Siberians--the men from Omsk,
Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk
and Barnaul--the
men with whom it was his destiny to
repel the enemy onslaught.
The Siberians came to the Volga
well-prepared. The Division had been well-trained before being sent to the
front. Colonel Gurtiev had trained his men
thoroughly and wisely, had never stood for any nonsense and if anything had
been over-exacting. He knew that however hard military training might be--the
night practice raids, the lying in trenches and slits being "ironed" by tanks, the long forced marches--the
real thing was far grimmer. He had faith in the fortitude and stamina of his Siberians. He had tested it on the
way to the front, when throughout the whole long journey there had been only
one incident: one of the soldiers had dropped his rifle from the moving
train, and had leapt down, picked it up and run three kilometers to the next station to rejoin his regiment.
He had tested their stamina in the Stalingrad
steppes, where his men had had their baptism of fire and calmly repelled a surprise attack of thirty German tanks.
He had tested their endurance during the last leg of the march to Stalingrad, when they had covered two hundred
kilometers in forty-eight hours. Yet he still looked anxiously at the faces
of the men, now that they were there on the front line, where they would be
bearing the brunt of the main attack.
Gurtiev had great faith in his officers. His young
Chief of Staff, Tarasov, did not know what
tiredness was: he could sit for days and nights in a dugout that was
constantly being shaken by explosions, poring over maps, planning the
complicated battle ahead. His uncompromising judgment, his habit of looking life straight in the face
and getting to the bottom of a situation to know the truth, however bitter,
were based on unflinching faith. There was unshakable strength of mind and
spirit hidden in that thin youth with the face, speech and hands of a
peasant. The Colonel's political instructor Lieutenant Svirin
was possessed of an iron will,
a sharp mind, and a tremendous capacity for self-denial. He could remain calm, cheerful and smiling, where
even the calmest and most cheerful would lose their smile. Markelov, Mikhalyev and Chamov, the regimental commanders, were the Colonel's
pride and joy. He had as much faith in them as in himself. The whole Division
spoke with love and admiration of Chamov's silent
courage, Markelov's grit, and the fine qualities of
Mikhalyev, the darling of his regiment, who was
like a father to his subordinates, a gentle, good-natured soul, and
completely fearless. Even so. Colonel Gurtiev now
looked anxiously at the faces of his regimental commanders, for he knew what
bearing the brunt of the main attack meant, what it meant to hold the line in
Stalingrad. "Will they stand up to
it?" he wondered.
Hardly had the division had time to entrench itself in the stony ground of Stalingrad, hardly
had the command post moved into a deep gallery cut in the sandy escarpment
above the Volga, the communications lines been laid and the transmitters
begun to tap out their messages to the artillery positions on the other side
of the river, hardly had the first pale light of dawn pierced the darkness,
than the Germans opened fire. For
eight hours solid the German Junkers dive-bombed the Division's positions,
for eight hours, without a moment's pause, wave after wave of German planes
passed over, for eight hours the
sirens wailed, the bombs whistled through the air, the earth trembled and
what was left of the brick buildings crashed to the ground. For eight
hours the air was dark with smoke and dust and deadly splinters zipped everywhere. Anyone who has heard the
whine of the air rent by falling bomb, anyone who has experienced an intense
ten-minute bombing raid by the Luftwaffe will understand what eight hours of
solid aerial bombardment by dive-bombers means. For eight hours the Siberians
kept up a constant barrage of fire at the enemy aircraft, and the Germans
doubtless felt something like despair as the whole area of the plant, burning
and shrouded in a black cloud of dust and smoke, crackled with rifle shots,
rattled with machine-gun fire, the short thuds of anti-tank rifles and the
regular, angry fire of ack-ack guns. It would seem
that everything living must be
broken, annihilated; yet there were the Siberian Division, dug into
the ground, uncowed and unbroken, keeping up a
continuous deadly barrage of fire. The Germans had thrown in their heavy
mortars and artillery. The monotonous hiss of mines and the crash of shells
merged with the whine of sirens and the roar of exploding bombs. So it
continued until nightfall. Then in solemn silence the Red Army men buried their dead comrades. That was
the first day, the "house-warming". The German mortar-batteries
kept up their racket all night, and few of the men got any sleep.
That night at the command post. Colonel Gurtiev met
two old friends he had not seen for over twenty years. Men who had parted
young bachelors now met again old and grey. Two of them were divisional
commanders, and the third commanded a tank brigade. They embraced, and all
those present--the HQ chiefs, adjutants and majors of the operations
staff--saw tears in the eyes of these grey-haired men.
"Would you believe it! Would you believe
it!" they exclaimed over and over. And indeed there was something
magnificent and extremely moving in this meeting between friends of youth at
this grim hour, amid the burning factory buildings and the ruins of Stalingrad.
The German artillery pounded away all night, and as soon as it was light
forty dive-bombers appeared, and again the sirens wailed, again the black
cloud of dust and smoke billowed high above the plant, shrouding the ground,
the workshops, the wrecked railway wagons, and even the tall factory
chimneys. That morning Markelov's regiment emerged
from the cover of their trenches, dugouts and shelters, left their stone and
concrete burrows and went into the attack. They advanced over slag heaps and
ruins, past the granite administrative building of the plant, over rails and
across suburban allotments. They went past thousands of jagged bomb craters, with the whole inferno of
German air raids overhead. A rain of iron lashed them from ahead, and still
they went on. And the enemy once again was seized by a superstitious fear:
were those really men advancing to the attack, were they mere mortals?
They were mortals al1 right. Markelov's regiment
advanced a thousand yards and occupied new positions, digging themselves in.
Only here in Stalingrad do people really
know what a thousand yards is. It means three thousand feet, thirty-six
thousand inches. At night the enemy attacked the regiment with greatly
superior forces. German battalions of infantry advanced supported by heavy
tanks, and a thick hail of
machine-gun bullets showered down on the regiment's positions. Drunken German soldiers pushed forward with
the stubbornness of the insane. The dead bodies of the soldiers, and
their comrades who heard how throughout the night and the next day and again
the next night Russian machine-guns rattled and Russian hand-grenades
exploded will bear witness to how Markelov's
regiment fought. The tale of this battle will be told by the burnt-out German
tanks, the long rows of crosses with German helmets on them marking the
graves of platoons, companies and battalions.
They were indeed mere mortals, and none of them returned.
The third day the German aircraft were in the air over the Division's
positions not eight hours but twelve. They were still up there after
nightfall, and out of the high dark vault of the night sky came the wailing
sirens of the Junkers, and the heavy, frequent thuds of the bombs hammering
the ground and exploding in a vast
sheet of smoky, red flames. The German guns and mortars showered
shells and bombs on the Division from morning till night. The Germans had a
hundred artillery regiments in the Battle of Stalingrad. Sometimes they would
harass us with short bombardments, and at night-time they would keep up a
steady systematic barrage that was a great nuisance. They were supported by
mortar batteries. This was the line of the main attack!
Several times a day the German guns and mortars suddenly fell silent and the
sky was suddenly empty of dive-bombers. An uncanny silence descended. Then
the observers cried: "Action stations," and the men in the forward
lines grabbed their incendiary bottles at the ready, the anti-tank riflemen
opened their ammunition bags, the tommy-gunners
wiped their guns on their palms, and the grenadiers moved their boxes of
hand-grenades closer. This short silence did not mean a pause. It meant an
attack was imminent.
Soon the clank of caterpillar tracks and the low rumble of engines announced
the approaching tanks, and the lieutenant shouted: "Get ready, comrades!
Tommy-gunners coming through on the left flank!"
Sometimes the Germans came as close
as thirty or forty yards and the Siberians could see their grimy faces
and torn greatcoats, and hear the guttural cries, threats, and jibes. And
after the Germans had been repulsed, the dive-bombers and the waves of gun
and mortar fire pounded the Division with renewed fury.
Our artillery played an invaluable role in repulsing the German attacks. Fugenfirov, the commander of the artillery regiment, and
the battalion and battery commanders were up in front with the Siberian
Division. They were in direct radio contact with the firing positions, and
the crews of dozens of powerful long-range guns across the Volga
breathed as one with the infantry, sharing their every joy and sorrow, their
every anxiety. The artillery was invaluable in dozens of ways: it covered the
infantry positions with a solid shield of fire, mangled the German tanks as if they were made of cardboard,
those heavy tanks that the anti-tank units were unable to deal with, mowed
down the tommy-gunners advancing under cover of the
tanks, pounded now a square, now an enemy troop concentrations, blowing up
ammunition dumps and sending mortar batteries sky-high. At no other time in
the course of the war had the infantry felt such friendly support from the
artillery as at Stalingrad.
In the course of a month the enemy launched one hundred and seventeen attacks
against the Siberian Division.
There was one terrible day when the
German tanks and infantry attacked twenty-three times. And all twenty-three
attacks were repulsed. Every day except three for a month, the
Luftwaffe was in the air over the Division's positions for ten to twelve
hours--three hundred and twenty hours in the whole month. The operations department counted up the
astronomical number of bombs dropped on the Division. It ran into tens of
thousands; so did the number of Luftwaffe sorties. All this on a front
little over a mile long! The roar of
explosions was enough to deafen the whole of mankind, the fire and
metal was enough to wipe a whole country off the map. The Germans thought
they were breaking the morale of the Siberians. They thought they had
exceeded the limits of human endurance, the power of human hearts and nerves
to stand up to such punishment. But, amazingly, the men had not crumpled, had
not gone insane, had not lost control of their hearts and nerves, but had
instead become stronger and calmer. The sturdy, tight-lipped Siberians had
become even sterner, even more tight-lipped; their cheeks had become hollow,
and their eyes more determined. Here where the brunt of the German attack was
borne there was no singing, no
accordions, no light conversation in the
short lulls in the fighting. Here men were undergoing a super-human strain.
There were times when no one slept
for three or four days and nights, and talking with his men Gurtiev was pained to hear a soldier say quietly:
"We've got everything, Comrade Colonel; nine hundred grammes
of bread, and hot meals in thermoses twice a day
without fail--but we're just not hungry."
Gurtiev loved and respected his men, and he knew
that when a soldier is "not hungry", he's
really finding the going hard. But now Gurtiev's
mind was at ease. He realized that there was no power on earth that could
shake his Siberians. The soldiers and their officers had learned a lot from
their bitter experience in battle. Their defense had become even better and
firmer. There was now a vast defense system in front of the factory
workshops--dugouts, communication trenches and firing-points; the engineers
had taken the defense works well forward in front of the plant. The troops
had learned to maneuvre underground in a quick organiszd manner, to concentrate and disperse, pass from
the workshops to the forward trenches via the communication trenches or vice
versa, depending on where the Luftwaffe was attacking, depending on from
which quarter the German tanks and infantry were advancing. Underground
"feelers" were dug along which men could reach the heavy German
tanks standing only a hundred yards from the workshops. The engineers mined
all the approaches to the plant. They had to carry the mines in their hands, two at a time, holding them
under their arm-pits like loaves of bread. The route from the river bank to
the plant twisted for four or five miles and was constantly under enemy fire.
Mining had to be carried out in pitch
darkness, before the dawn, often within as little as a hundred feet of
the nazi positions. In this manner some two thousand mines were planted
under the scattered timbers of wooden houses destroyed by the bombing, under
piles of stones, and in bomb and shell craters. The men had learned to defend
big buildings by keeping up a solid curtain of fire from the ground to the
fifth floor, to build remarkably well-camouflaged observation posts right
under ,the Germans' noses, to make good use of large bomb craters and the
whole complex system of gas, oil and water mains beneath the plant. Radio
contact between the artillery and the infantry was improving daily and it
sometimes seemed as if they were no longer separated by the Volga,
as if the accurate guns, which instantly reacted to every movement by the
enemy, were right there alongside the troops and the command posts.
The men's moral fibre had grown along with their
experience. They themselves could not feel, did not understand, could not sense the psychological changes that had taken place in them during their
month in hell, on the front line of the great defense of Stalingrad.
They thought they were the same as they had always been. In the short lulls
they would wash in the underground
bath-chambers, eat the hot food brought them in thermoses, and Makarevich and Karnaukhov, with
their great growth of beard, like peacetime village postmen, came under fire
to the forward lines with their leather bags, carrying newspapers and letters
from far-off Siberian villages. The men remembered their peacetime village
jobs as carpenters, smiths or farmers. They jokingly referred to the German
six-barrel mortar as "goofy"
and the dive-bombers with their sirens as "fiddlers" or
"musicians". In reply to the threatening cries of the German tommy-gunners from nearby ruins "Hei,
Russ, bul-bul, sdauaisa!"
(Surrender or you'll be blowing bubbles-i.e., in the Volga), they laughed and
said cheerfully to one another: "How come the Germans don't want to
drink out of the Volga? Or are they satisfied with putrid water?"
They thought they were the same people as before, and only the new arrivals
from across the river looked with amazement at these men who knew no fear, for whom the words "life" and
"death" no longer existed. Only an outsider could appreciate
the iron strength of the Siberians, their calm determination to bear their
heavy lot to the end.
Heroism had become a part of everyday life, of the very manner of these men;
it had become a prosaic, mundane habit. Heroism was present at all times and
in everything. There was heroism in the work of the cooks, peeling potatoes while incendiary shells
exploded all around. There was great heroism in the work of the young
nurses, the schoolgirls from Tobolsk, who went on
bandaging the wounded, and giving them water to drink in the heat of the
battle. Yes, to the outsider's eyes there was heroism in every little
movement the men of the Division made: in the way the commander of the
communications platoon Khamitsky sat calmly in a
mound in front of the dugout reading belles-lettres, while the German
dive-bombers swooped around; in the way communications officer Batrakov carefully wiped his spectacles, put reports into
his field-bag and set off for seven and a half miles through the "Ravine
of Death" with perfectly normal calm, as if he were out for a Sunday
morning stroll; in the way the tommy-gunner Kolosov, buried up to the neck in earth and splintered
boards after an explosion in the dugout, smiled at the deputy commander of
the Division, Svirin; in the way the HQ typist, a
robust, red-cheeked Siberian woman, Klava Kopylova, began to type a combat order in one dugout, was
buried and dug out, went to type on in another, was again buried and dug out,
and still finished her typing in a third dugout and took it to the divisional
commander to be signed.
These were the kind of people that stood in the line of the main attack.
The Germans know better than anyone how stubbornly they resisted. One night a
prisoner was brought to Svirin in his dugout. His
hands, and his grey-stubbled face were caked with
grime, and the woollen scarf round his neck was
like a filthy floorcloth. He served in a special
Iron Guard unit, had fought in all the campaigns and was a member of the nazi party. After the routine interrogation, Svirin asked: "What is the Germans' opinion of the
resistance in the area of the Plant?" The question was translated for
the prisoner, who stood leaning back against the stone wall of the dugout. He
was lost for words and burst into tears. Yes, these were real men who bore
the brunt of the main attack, and their hearts and nerves did not fail them.
After almost twenty days the Germans launched a "decisive" attack
on the plant. Never in history had an assault been preceded by such massive
preparation. The Luftwaffe and the
heavy mortars and artillery showered the Division with bombs and shells for
eighty hours solid: three days and nights that were a chaos of smoke, fire
and thunder. The whistle of falling bombs, the scream of mortar shells
from the six-barrel "goofies", the
thunder of heavy shells and the protracted wail of the sirens was alone
enough to deafen people--but they were only the prelude to the thunder of
explosions. Jagged tongues of flame
spurted up and the air was rent by the howl of tormented metal. For
eighty hours it went on, then the preparation
finished suddenly at five in the morning and immediately German tanks and
infantry advanced to the attack. The Germans managed to penetrate into the
plant workshops, their tanks roared at its very walls, they broke through our
defenses and cut off the command posts from the forward lines. It would have
seemed that deprived of their commanders, further resistance by the troops
would have been impossible, and that the command posts, under direct enemy
attack, would be wiped out. But an extraordinary thing happened: every
trench, every dugout, every firing-point and every fortified ruin became a
separate, isolated fortress with its own command, its own communications. Sergeants and rank-and-file soldiers assumed
command, and skillfully repulsed all attacks. And in this bitter,
critical hour, the commanders and HQ staff turned the command posts into
fortified strong-points, and fought like rank-and-file soldiers to repulse
the enemy attacks. Chamov beat off ten attacks. A
giant, red-haired tank commander defending Chamov's
command post used up all his grenades
and ammunition and then took to hurling stones at the advancing
Germans. Chamov himself manned a mortar. The golden
boy of the Division, Mikhalyev, was killed by a
direct bomb hit on the command post. "They've killed our father,"
said the men. Major Kushnaryov, who replaced Mikhalyev, transferred his command post to a concrete
pipe that passed beneath the workshops. Along with his Chief-of-Staff, Dyatlenko, and six other staff officers he successfully
defended the entrance to the pipe for several hours with a few boxes of
grenades, repulsing numerous German attacks.
This battle, unequalled in its
cruelty and ferocity, lasted for several days and nights uninterrupted. It
was fought for every step of a staircase, for every corner in a dark passage,
for every machine and the space between them, for every gas pipe. No one took
a step back in this battle. And if the Germans gained some ground it meant
that there was nobody left alive to defend it. Everyone fought like
the giant red-haired tankman, whose name Chamov was never to learn; like the sapper Kosichenko, who, his left arm broken, took to removing
the pin of his grenades with his teeth. It was as if the fallen were giving
added strength to the living, and there
were moments when ten men held a line that had been defended by a whole
battalion. The workshops changed hands many times in the course of the
battle. The Germans succeeded in occupying several buildings and workshops.
It was in this battle that the German offensive reached its climax. This was
the high-water mark of their main attack. As if they had lifted a weight that
was too heavy for them, they overstrained some inner spring that had set
their battering-ram in motion.
The German onslaught began to falter. They had three divisions, the 94th, the
305th and the 389th, fighting the Siberians. Their hundred and seventeen
infantry attacks cost 5,000 German lives. The Siberians withstood this
superhuman pressure. Two thousand tons of scrap metal from enemy tanks
littered the ground in front of the plant. Thousands of tons of bombs, mines
and shells had fallen on the factory yard and on the workshops, but still the
Division held out. The troops faced death, without ever once looking back,
for they knew that behind them lay
the Volga and the fate of Russia.
One cannot help wondering how this tremendous strength was forged. It was
partly the national character, the tremendous sense of responsibility, and that
stolid Siberian stubbornness, excellent military and political training and
strict discipline. But there was something else I should like to mention as
having played no mean role in this great, tragic epic and that was the
amazingly fine morale and the strong
bond of love that united all the men of the Siberian Division. A
spirit of Spartan simplicity was characteristic of the whole staff. It was
reflected in ordinary, everyday details, in the refusal to accept the rationed hundred grammes
of vodka that was theirs by right throughout the whole long Stalingrad battle, and in their sensible, calm,
businesslike manner. I saw the love that united the men of the Division, in
the deep distress with which they mourned the loss of their fallen comrades.
I saw it in the moving meeting between the grey-haired Colonel Gurtiev and the battalion nurse, Zoya
Kalganova, when she returned to duty after her
second wound. "Hello, my dear child," Gurtiev
said quietly, and quickly went forward with outstretched hands to greet the
thin girl with close-cropped hair-just like a father greeting his own
daughter.
This love and faith in one another was what helped the soldiers in the heat
of battle to take the place of their commander and the commanders and staff
to take up machine-guns, hand-grenades, and incendiary bottles to repulse the
German tanks approaching the command post.
The wives and children of these men will never forget their husbands and
fathers who fell in the great battle on the Volga.
They cannot be forgotten, these fine, true men. There is only one worthy way
in which our Red Army can honor the sacred memory of the men who bore the
brunt of the enemy's main attack-and that is by an unlimited, liberating
offensive. We believe that the hour
of this offensive is at hand.
November 1942
Translated
by: Anonymo
THE END
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