Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 1942. RUSSIA STRIKES FIRST.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 May 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 1942. RUSSIA STRIKES FIRST.

JT is nine'll 100 soon yet to assume that the tide 01. war has turned, definitely and finally on the Eastern front. Germany is possessed of a mighty military machine, and short of its unforseen failure or collapse a long-continued and bitter effort will be needed to destroy it. There is every likelihood that, the armies of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany will before long be locked in greater battles than those now being fought in the Kharkov area and in the Crimea.

With, possibilities to this extent open where the immediate future is concerned, much that is ('neonraging and ol good promise from the standpoint of Russia and her Allies is, however, to be noted in the conditions in which conflict has been resumed on the Eastern front. The primary fact which stands out is that, after all the boasts Hitler and his propagandists had made of a coming spring offensive, it is the Russians and not the Nazis who have taken the initiative.

The attack on. the Kerch Peninsula, in the Crimea, in which the Germans are still engaged, is altogether overshadowed, in magnitude and in the possibilities it opens up, by the offensive launched by Marshal Timoshenko in the Ukraine. It lias been suggested that the enemy action against the Kerch Peninsula was intended to be incidental only to action on a much greater scale in the Ukraine. ■ 'This probably is true and if it is the enemv is being attacked in the area in which he had himself honed and intended to attack.

In any case, in an area in which they have carried modern field fortification and defence in depth to its practicable limits and have massed enormous forces, with a lull complement of mechanised and air support, the Germans have found themselves unable to withstand Russian thrusts which have penetrated to a depth of as much as forty miles and, as news stands, are being pressed with increasing vigour and effect. With a careful avoidance of false or easy optimism, it may be claimed that already there is much to demonstrate that the effective balance of forces on the Eastern front is vastly different from that which ruled when the Nazis made their treacherous attack on Russia in June last year.

Probably there is a long and grim struggle yet in prospect, ‘ but for the Germans failure to seize and exercise a strong initiative spells ultimate disaster. In its present scale, the Russian offensive visibly threatens, as one commentator has said, to break the offensive power of the German armies which are arrayed in the south for a drive eastward into the Caucasus. Marshal Timoshenko has told his troops that a new period of the Avar is being entered —“the period of the liberation of Soviet lands from the Hitlerite rabble.” That assertion may be well justified even should it prove, as it may, that the clearance of the rabble is destined yet to be an arduous and exacting task.