TWO EIGHTH ARMIES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 49, 15 February 1944, Page 4

TWO EIGHTH ARMIES

TO-DAY inside the dismal wasteland of the ,Kanev pocket, the newest scene of German disaster on the vast Russian front, the trapped German Eighth Army awaits its doom. On it are dawning the 'last grey days' and before it lies a future as bleak and as gaunt as the desolated Russian countryside it has despoiled. Once the pride of General Stemmerman's invasion force, ever-ready to provide the spear-head of new offensives, ever-ready to stage those valiant rearguard actions for which the Nazi army is now famous, it is to-day the helpless objective of seven converging columns. The Russian encircling movement has been well planned and perfectly timed —the two side thrusts being now only a bare three miles apart and likely to effect a junction at any moment. Black desperation has made the Nazi Eighth Army wage its last suicidal fight against an army which has pinned its arms to the ground, cut off its lines of communication and is overwhelming it with the terror of its air and artillery offensive. Hitler's Eighth Army defends hopelessly its circular ninety-mile front before it is finally engulfed in the avenging red flood that flows onward from the heart of a free and independent people. In Italy another Eighth Army, veterans of weary desert campaigning and the final conquest of North Africa, are grappling with Nazi divisions in the rain-sodden Italian Highlands. Up from the toe of Italy they have struck often and hard until with Rome: itself in sight they are fighting the elements as well as the enemy in the mountainous chain which forms the rocky spine of the Italian peninsula. This fighting force, the exploits of which have made its reputation tower above all others in the present conflict, is composed of men from all the Allied nations; Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Fighting French, Indian, Imperial and Colonial units, all have gone to make up a cosmopolitan striking force, the battle weight of which is feared in Hitler's High Command like) no other of its opponents. New Zealanders naturally take pardonable pride in the prowess of their own 'Kiwi' division the renown of which is.already world wide, and the heroism of which is justly acclaimed by friend and foemen alike. Thus we have the two Eighth Armies, each facing its own singular destiny and each bound to the varying causes for which it must fight to the last man as Hitler has already ordered his to do. .