VITAL HINGE

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 105, 28 January 1943, Page 5

VITAL HINGE

Critical Battle Reviewed

(British Oflicial Wireless.) (Received January 27, 7 p.m.)

RUGBY, January 26. For several critical weeks six mouths ao-o the Voronezh sector was given first pface in the Soviet communiques. Though the German armies sweeping down between the Don and Donetz Rivers were rolling up the whole southern front, this almost stationary sector was thus recognized as a vital place where the enemy must not be allowed Voronezh was a hinge. The Germans never took the whole city the hinge held and the door, though flung open, was never thrown down. . Four months later the Russians began to swing it back, and now the Germans have lost their grasp on tlie hinge' itself. Voronezh wrecked the Germans last hop to defeat Russia before America could mobilize. The current German argument that the bridgehead had been abandoned to shorten the line is proved wrong by the obvious advantage to tlie Russians of having regained the railway running south ironi along its whole length to the Donetz industrial basin. Moreover, the shortening of the line will not. increase the German reserves unless the enemy can reform his battered divisions, which represent a loss far exceeding any gain which might accrue from the shortening of the line.