They Built a Bridge the Germans Could Not See

Manawatu Times, Volume 68, Issue 56, 8 March 1943, Page 6

They Built a Bridge the Germans Could Not See

How Russian engineers secretly built the bridge that watching Germans did not know spanned a river near Rjev, a river that had to be crossed in the ►Soviet advance on the city, is told in Time, the American news magazine.

The Germans are losing the war in Russia, which means that they are losing World War 11, Time says. On the frozen plains of Rjev before Moscow, on the Don and in the Volga corridor at Stalingrad, in the snows and floods of the Caucasus, the Russians are on the offensive. But the Russian offensives alone are not defeating the Germans. Time is defeating the Germans. Old victories and old defeats are defeating the Germans: the Red Army’s stands, retreats and counter-attacks; the Wehrmacht’s losses at Smolensk, Rjev and Moscow; the men and weapons spent, the weeks forever lost at Sabastopol, the spaces of the Ukraine, the Kuban plains and the upper Caucasus, conquered but nonetheless expensive to their conquerors; and, finally, the pit of Stalingrad. No one of these great battles, sieges or marches in the greatest campaign of history exhausted or defeated the German Army. But in /the aggregate, they saved Russia and they saved the Red Army. Without this perspective, dispatches and headlines inevitably give the impression that the Russians stand to win all or lose all in their first winter offensives of 1942. The impression is not shared by the hard-eyed, hard-mouthed peasant, Communist and soldier, Army General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, who commands the drive on the Rjev front and had much to do with planning the others.

After the fashion of soldiers in all armies, the men of Engineer Sosnovkin’s little command grumbled and cursed. They knew well enough that ihe instructions came from General Mukhim, the commander on their sector in the Rjev front. They supposed that General Mukhim had his orders from a man whom they seldom or never saw, whose name they almost never read in Red Star or Pravda, a man whom they all knew as the Liubimets (the pet, the favourite, the darling, the beloved) of the Red Army. But it was Engineer Sosnovkin, thin and unimpressive in his grey overcoat, who had to tell the men what General Zhukov, the Liubimets, now wanted of them.

He wanted them to build a bridge. This bridge was to span a river near Rjev. On the bank opposite the Russians, the Germans were waiting and watching. Yet this bridge had to be so devised that the Germans would neither see the men while they were building it, nor see the bridge after it was built. The men gaped at Engineer Sosnovkin, and in their individual ways pondered the demands of the insatiable Liubimets. Then they' went to work.

Engineer Sosnovkin decided to build his bridge in sections, 18 inches below the river’s surface. For many nights his men practised under-water construction on their side of the river, in a spot out of sight of the Germans. They set long pillars firmly in stone foundations. They clamped crosspieces to the pillars with oiled nuts and bolts, in the freezing water and darknesf they did it all by touch.

The Russian bank where the bridge was to be built was low, fiat and easily seen by the Germans atop their high, sheer bank. Engineer Sosnovkin therefore decided to build his bridge backwards from the German side, beginning it in the shelter of the high bank. On a night when clouds hid the moon and snow shrouded the river, the strongest

swimmers crossed with the foundation stones in stretchers and in their tunics. Others swam with the logs. Blue-black with cold, praying that the ice along the bank would not crack and detray them by the sound, they laid the first sections in utter silence. Chest-deep in the waters near the bank, they were cut, bloodied and sometimes knocked off their feet by ice floes. Once the Germans sensed that something was up

and fired aimlessly at the dark river, wounding several Russian sappers. But Engineer Sosnovkin’s men returned a second night and a third. Unseen by the Germans, they completed their bridge. Then lie stood in his grey coat by the river and waited. Russian artillery suddenly loosed a great barrage. Engineer Sosnovkin saw the puffs of the shells bursting in the German posiFrom the .woods behind him, Russian tanks, whitened for winter war, snouted down to the bank, crunched through the ice and found his bridge. In squadiron after squadron they charged toward the stupified Germans and opened the Rjev offensive. Joseph Stalin keeps his chosen adadvisers close by him. Army General Zhukov, at 45 (or 4S, some say) officially a Hero of the Soviet Union, wearer of the Order of Lenin and victor over the Japanese in Mongolia, is First Vico Commissar for Defence and second only to Commisar Joseph Stalin in U.S.R.R. military councils. Georgy Zhukov fought iu the Red Revolution, served and studied under the Red Army’s famed mentor, Kikhail Frunze. He is a horseman and hunter, was successively a teacher at military schools, a staff officer and a field commander in the pre-1941 Red Army. Even Russians know little else about him, for General Zhukov lias made it his business to stay out of the public prints and eye. The few foreigners who have seen him remember him best for his “lion’s face,” his broad and rocky mouth. Like all successful Red Army commanders, he is a professing Communist and soincj k e is also, a 4eyofft ,

Said he after the Finnish War: “We would not be Bolsheviks if we allowed the glamour of victory to blind us to the shortcomings that have been revealed in tlie training of our men. These shortcomings were the result of conventionalism and routine.’’ Well before the U.S. Army learned the same lesson, General Zhukov began to apply it to the Red Army. Along with Timoshenko and Sliaposhnikov, ho braced up Red Army training, brought it as closely as possible to actual conditions of modern warfare. After the Germans suddenly brought war in earnest to the Russians, Stalin entrusted Zhukov with the outer defences of Moscow, and with the winter offensive which pushed the Germans back to their present lino at Rjev. Last summer, when the Germans launched their 1942 campaign, Zhukov still had the central front, and he was responsible for holding the Russians’ all-important pivot at Voronej. Last August, Stalin designated Zhukov First Vice Commissar for Defence, but left him in command of the central front. For reasons known only at the Kremlin, he also left him with his title of Army General, one degree below Marshals Sliaposhnikov, Timoshenko, Voroshilov. Marshal Shaposhnikov lately has been ill, and in the months when Stalin was planning his winter offensives, he turned more and more to his Liubimets. General Zhukov shares with most Russians the conviction that the German armies are not yet beaten, that they can be defeated only by a prodigious effort. He also knows that the Red Army, to win this winter, must show more offensive capacity than it has ever shown before. The Red Army is well equipped—superbly equipped considering Russia’s wartime poverty—chiefly because its leaders, General Zhukov included, had the wit and courage to retain and build up great reserves of munitions when the richest lands and cities of Russia were falling to the Germans. The true extent of those reserves, known only to the Red Army command, is one of the factors which will determine the course and outcome of the winter’s battles. And if worse comes to worst and the winter offensives fail, Joseph Stalin. Georgy Zhukov and the rest of the Red Army command will save | enough of .their reserves to try again, _