RUSSIA REJOICES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 8, Issue 12, 29 September 1944, Page 4

RUSSIA REJOICES

THE joy of the Russian people at the expulsion of the last of the invaders whom they had suffered for two years will be shared by all their allies. The first great defeat of Hitler's armies in Russia was when they failed to destroy the Red army and take Moscow, the capital, in 1941. They came very near to taking it. When the skill and courage of the Russians and the methods of "defence in depth," for which their vast country afforded room, had deprived the invaders again and again of decisive success, it was the onset of winter that saved JR,ussia. Thousands of German soldiers died from sheer cold, a fate Hitler's armies have suffered twice since on a 2,000-mile front. The failure to take Stalingrad in November of the next year, when the whole of Germany's Sixth Army was destroyed or captured, was the turning of the tide of the eastern war. Since then the Germans have been almost continuously on the defensive, as in the war generally. Last September Smolensk and in November Kiev were lost by them. At the time when Moscow was threatened, Leningrad, which un-i der its successive names of St. Petersburg and Petrograd had been the former capital, was cut off from the rest of Russia—placed in a position of siege, from which it was retrieved a year ago. Railway access to it was then restored to the great relief of its people, but the misery of long' range bombardment by artillery has also ended, with promise of still greater German reverses. His Russian adventure has cost Hitler far more, in . lives of men and in material, than his like attempt cost Napoleon, who did at least enter Moscow. The Russian front has been a nightmare and a graveyard to German armies since the adventure, which was the Fuehrer's own, not approved by his High Command, began. A year ago, when the siege of Leningrad was raised, the war was going well for the Allies in Africa, and their air supremacy was definite and increasing, but the U-boats were still sinking ships faster than ships were being built, with the possibility of undoing all. Now that weapon has been conquered the Allies would be foolish indeed if they allow Hitler and his fellow-ruffians to find a refuge in Argentina or any other country overseas which, with the watch that will be kept upon them, they would find it difficult to reach.