Complete Panic Seizes Retreating Enemy

Manawatu Times, Volume 69, Issue 60, 14 March 1944, Page 5

Complete Panic Seizes Retreating Enemy

(By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright.) Received Monday, 11.30 p.m. LONDON, March 13. The Germans are being thrown back across the Bug on a broad front in the centre of the Red Army’s drive to wards the Carpathians and Black Sea and are still abandoning great quantities of material, says the Moscow correspondent of the British United Press. The Red Army as the result of the latest advances, including the crossing of the Ingul River, has opened the way to the naval base of Nikolaiev, while on the right wing of the 400-mile Ukrainian front the Russian grip is closing on the remaining German strongholds on the Lwow-Odessa railway which bar the way to the Dniester. A Russian supplementary communique states: “The Germans in the ProsKurov sector are suffering heavy losses in men and material. The Russians advancing westward from Uman occupied Dzhulinki (a district centre on the left bank of the Southern Bug). Soviet troops pressed the remnants of the defeated Germans into the river. The enemy lost 25,000 killed and many drowned in attempting to swim the river.” Stating the the battle for the final liberation of the Western Ukraine was being fought, Pravda points ou that the Red Army has entered the Odessa region for the first time since the Germans captured the city nearly 2£ years ago. •‘The Red Army won’t Btop at these successes. It will continue to perfect its military skill and by the perfect coordination of firepower and manoeuvre will continue to break the enemy’s defences in their whole depth. It will continue to hunt the enemy day and night, disregarding overflowing rivers and the roadlessness of spring. “The ghost of Stalingrad is stalking among the German troops, forcing them to try at all costs to avoid encirclement. They are becoming sensitive to the outflanking manoeuvres and attacks from the rear. Complete panic has seized the Germans. They are throwing away food packs, ammunition belts, light machineguns and even rifles and gasmasks, ’ * add Pravda.