TOWN SURRENDERED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 August 1943, Page 4

TOWN SURRENDERED

isr- ..... TO ALLIED INFANTRY UNITS

MASSES OF DEBRIS BLOCK MANY STREETS.

POWER STATION DEMOLISHED BY GERMANS.

(By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 12.50 p.m.) ■ LONDON, August 5. The German withdrawal from Catania was forced by an outflanking move by the British and Canadian troops on a sectoi’ centred about 15 miles to the north-west, near Ademo, and was hastened by a frontal attack. The Associated Press of Great Britain’s correspondent with the Eighth Army says Catania was the second city in Sicily to surrender to the victorious Eighth Army, at 8.30 a.m. today. After the trnnns hnd pnterprl thp outskirts.

soon after dawn, the majority of the defenders, who were in pillboxes covering the roads to the city, fled. The surrender was made to a colonel leading the first infantry units into the town. As the British troops entered the streets, frenzied civilians ran alongside cheering, clapping and kissing the soldiers* hands. The correspondent adds that men, women and children crowded around the cars, frequently begging for food. Some people had a sufficient command of English to say that they had been virtually without food of any kind for a week. ’‘There was no mistaking the words with which we were hailed as liberators,” the correspondent adds. “Eager citizens, in joyful demonstration, almost mobbed a unit of British infantry, which, after combing the town for possible snipers, assembled in a street leading to the town’s main square. Masses of debris from the Allied bombing were still blocking many streets.”

Reuter's correspondent in Catania says: “Surely never has a conquering army been so greeted. The Eighth Army everywhere was welcomed by the Sicilians. Mingled with the cheers was the hard, saddening cry: ‘Give us something to eat.’ Like the people of every German-occupied city, the Cat.anians have suffered through the German habit of robbing them of food and looting their shops.” The correspondent says that in some quarters there seemed scarcely a house which had not been hit. Some places were simply mounds of rubble, but the cathedral is undamaged. Not all the damage was done by bombs.. The town’s power station was blazing fiercely as- the British entered, the work of German demolition engineers. Mines are the greatest danger in the city. Two hundred Italian prisoners, taken early in the morning, said they had been sowing mines in the city for five days.