STATE OF TENSION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 May 1943, Page 3

STATE OF TENSION

REPORTED IN THE KUBAN TERRITORY PREPARATIONS FOR COMING BATTLE. ; HEAVY DEFEAT OF RECENT GERMAN ATTACKS. LONDON, May 3. On the Kuban front both sides are rushing preparations for the coming battle, which may open soon. Only small-scale fencing is reported on the rest of the Russian front. German attacks in the Kuban, an earlier message stated, have been decisively smashed after six days of heavy fighting. The Germans called it heavy defensive fighting, but Moscow in the overnight communique reveals that the Germans and not the Russians were on the offensive. For several days, the enemy delivered the full weight of his blows in the Novorossisk region, using infantry , with strong air cover. The Germans ' only succeeded in further bleeding themselves white as they lost more than 7000 officers and men and 25 armoured vehicles, including tanks. RUSSIAN LANDINGS. For two days, Russian troops who landed from invasion barges on the north and south sides of the German bridgehead in the Kuban, have been fighting savagely against numerically superior German and Rumanian forces. The Stockholm correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph” says that the battle | grows fiercer. The Russians are main-1 taining silence till the outcome of the I landings is known. | 1 j VILLAGE POPULATION MASSACRED BY GERMANS. SOLE SURVIVOR’S STORY. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright ) MOSCOW, May 2. One woman, Varvara Kapustina, remains alive out of 250 inhabitants after the German occupation of the small settlement of Kholstinka, in the Kursk region. The Germans had killed her husband and five children.

Mrs Kapustina described how the Germans, scared by guerillas, chose the settlement as an object of revenge. They drove all the women out of the village and opened up machine-guns on them.

Mrs Kapustina said: “The Hitlerites passed me three times, but I pretended to be dead, lying face downwards among murdered children.” Her youngest child was five years old and her oldest fourteen. v She found the body of her husband among dozens of bodies of villagers whom the Germans had driven into a house which they later blew up. The Germans, before leaving, fired the settlement.