GREAT VICTORY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 September 1943, Page 4

GREAT VICTORY

ALLEGED BY BERLIN RADIO. (Received This Day, 12.30 p.m.) LONDON, September 14. The Berlin radio continues to claim that the Germans have achieved a great victory in the Salerno-Eboli sector. “The American formation in the bridgehead south of Salerno,” it states, “has been in disorderly flight, since late yesterday, to the coast, to reach ita ships. In the circumstances the position of the British in the SalernoAmalfi sector will become untenable and it can only be a matter of hours before they take to flight. The battle is not yet finished but it can safely be concluded that we have inflicted a great defeat, comparable with Dunkirk and Dieppe.” According to the Berlin radio,. big Canadian forces are participating in the Salerno offensive. Captain Sertorius stated that the Americans had little fighting experience and that their casualties were partly explainable by the fact that they were for the first time making the acquaintance of German weapons, which so far have been used only on the Eastern front. Claiming that the American Fifth Army has been largely wiped out the Berlin radio said it consisted of the 36th and 45th Infantry Divisions, and the First United States Tank Division and added that the forces of the British Tenth Army Corps, which was attached to the Fifth Army, consisted of the 46th and 56th British Infantry Divisions and the First British Tank Division. The Paris radio’s commentator, Jean Faquis, referring to one German coun-ter-attack, said that as a last resort the Allied Command threw some units of the United States Seventh Army into the battle, “but even these crack, American troops were unable to change the fortune of a battle that had been lost already.”