CONTINUOUS FIGHT

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 141, 13 August 1941, Page 2

CONTINUOUS FIGHT

WAR IN RUSSIA

A BATTLE DESCRIBED

An eye-witness account of two week's warfare no the Russo-German

front was given me to-day by Paul Nilin, "W. year old novelist who was recently given a Stalin award of 100,000 roubles for the scenario of the Soviet-made film, "The Great Life," cables Erslune Caldwell, special correspondent ot the Daily Express from Moscow.

Nilin went to the front as a writei observer on the day after war began

"■One oi the biggest engagements i saw lasted continuously for tnree nlglils and four days," he said. "The Germans sent a large force across a river. They were met by a smaller force of the Red Army and the battle ranged over an area of about two square miles. "Our soldiers fought all this time; without food supplies, and I presume the Germans did the same. At the end of the fourth day fresh Red Army troops came up. That Avas the end of the engagement. The Germans —what were left of them—retreated." Nilin saw air battles, tank battles, and infantry engagements during his stay in his unnamed sector. In one tank battle both sides used their biggest tanks and Nilin declaiv/i the Soviet tanks were obviousIvl stronger because they were able to race headlong into the German tanks and uuset them.

"During infantry engagements." he went on, "the Germans ailways did a lot of shouting at each other, generally calling for help or yelling instructions. The Soviet troops fought in determined silence."

Thc Germans have evidently been convinced by propaganda that they eannot be. beaten, because, when they do lose, they break down like babies.

Peasant Terrorise Nazi Airmen

Nil in said that when German olanes were brought down, peasants rushed up, surrounded the plane and airmen, and guarded them with axes nnd pitchforks. The German crews were more afraid of being hacked to pieces by angry peasants than they were of being captured. Several airmen he talked to had made bombing raids on England. Two who wore the Tron Cross had maps of England •Tinted on the fuselages of their planes. Some prisoners told Nilin that they were in France a few days before the war with the U.S.S.R. started, and that, without being told where they were being taken, they were put on trains and brought to the Soviet border, where tliey began fighting before theyi had a chance to find out what it was all about.

According to Nilin, many of the German bombing aeroplanes contained three Germans and one Czech —the Czech was always the reu>gunner. Captured Czechs invariably said they had been forced by the Germans to become rear gunners Because that was the most dangerous seat in the plane.

The German infantry, lie said, were afraid of bayonet attacks. They don't mind fighting with machineguns or other fire weapons, but they begin yelling, shouting and surrendering by the hundreds when the Red Army launches a bayonet attack . "The Germans always give themselves up by shouting 'Genosse. genosse, genosse'—the Nazi Party'?. l own word for 'comrade'."