OREL BASTION SWASHED

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 06, Issue 96, 6 August 1943, Page 4

OREL BASTION SWASHED

"THE Russian forces massed in front of Orel have smas e through the ring of German defences and are now pursuing the fleeing enemy towards the town." Thus the message which recorded the final and most crucial batt e on the whole of the Russian front. Thrilled with the overthrow of the Axis armies in North Africa and absorbed in the progress of our forces in Sicily since the collapse o Fascism we have little conception of the vast and bloody struggle; which is taking place on this bitter salient south of Moscow. Where we have some 250,000 men engaged in Sicily, on the Russian front millions of men face each other, not in the freezing cold of the Russian winter but in the warm days of early autumn. Grim, bitter men, with hatred and determination in their hearts, for the swaying fortunes of war and the atrocity lists on both sides, have brought about a blood lust in Russia, which we can never understand. Were we to see our homes wrecked, our families killed in cold blood, helpless civilians butchered, or wandering aimlessly about in long lines of pitiful refugees, were we to know hunger want and lack of shelter and to realise that the blame for all these evils lay at the door of the hatred invader —then we could gain something of the ferocity with which the average Russian soldier wages his war. On the other hand the treachery and innate stubbornness of the Russian population has infuriated the German soldiery beyond endurance and the excesses and instances of wanton brutality if we are to be scrupulously fair are probably more often caused by these characteristics than from sheer beastiality. Thus a miniature of the fighting in Russia, which to-day is concentrated outside the fortress town of Orel —a centre strengthened and fortified by the German army technicians since the winter of 1941 when the invaders fell back on the town in their first disastrous retreat. What next. The next point is that we have to realise that the present Soviet drive is actually a counter move which not only offset the German summer offensive, but turned attack into defence and finally defeat. It is even better than that for it marks the first occasion when the Russians have been able to take the field and initiate a successful campaign against the invaders under any other than winter conditions. It is in fact a new guage on Soviet military superiority and its outcome may well have a big bearing on the impending landslide, which will preclude the hoped for German collapse.