MORE GAINS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 October 1943, Page 3

MORE GAINS

MADE BY RUSSIANS ON SEVERAL OFFENSIVE FRONTS TANKS TAKEN ACROSS DNIEPER LONDON, October 8. Further progress lias been made by the Russians on all their main offensive fronts. Tonight’s Moscow communique states that heavy fighting continued today on the right bank of the river Dnieper, where the Red Army is enlarging its bridgeheads. A Moscow correspondent says the Russians have thrown tanks across the I'iver and that these are already in action. Three hundred miles further north Soviet forces are fighting their way towards Vitebsk and have advanced up to 7% miles and recaptured more than 150 places. Further north still, they have followed up their capture of Nevel and made a new advance and retaken 60 towns and villages. In the extreme south the Red Army is mopping up the remaining Germans in the Taman Peninsula. On all fronts yesterday the number of enemy tanks knocked out was 50 and the number of planes shot down 87. BASELESS BOASTS OF "SAFELY REACHING DNIEPER.” MADE BY GERMAN PAPERS. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) LONDON, October 7. The German newspapers are congratulating the German leadership and army on “safely reaching the Dnieper,” thus bringing to a close the greatest retreat movement in history, greater and more difficult by far than Hindenberg’s withdrawal on the Western Front, says the Stockholm correspondent of “The Times.” A German military writer says that the German withdrawal in Russia was a perfect masterpiece of the military art, by which the German armies escaped disaster, “but now this important phase in the southern half of the Russian front is closed and the Germans aro making a firm stand on the Dnieper. Another article says that vast quantities of Russian artillery were among the greatest surprises of the summer offensive. RUDELY AWAKENED GERMANS AND THE EASTERN CFRONT. ALLIED MENACE DEVELOPING ON ALL SIDES. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day. 10.30 a.m.) RUGBY, October 8. If the Germans, who for the past two and a half months have been compelled to retreat on the whole southern and central parts of the Russian front, thought the Dnieper would give them a respite, they have been 1 speedily undeceived. Yesterday the German Press suddenly began congratulating the High Command on having successfully escaped disaster and having brought the troops back to a firm lino of defence, thereby increasing their strength for the next phase. The enemy publicists may have been unaware at that moment that the Russians were throwing three armies simultaneously across the Dnieper. Doubtless the Nazis were making the best of a bad job. The very real importance of this line to Germany necessitates the most strenuous efforts to prevent the Russians breaching it before the autumn imposes a certain restriction on movement. By now, however, it is not only the Dnieper line and the Ukraine which are at stake. The Russians have extended the scope of their offensive yet further north and the whole territory between the Gulf of Riga and Leningrad is menaced by a double movement. The Russians are .pressing both directly against the head of the German salient on the Volkhov River line and also against the base at Nevel, in the direction of the Latvian border. . Of the three crossings of the Dnieper, that below Kremenchug threatens the German armies in the bend from Dnepropetrovosk to Zaporozhe. The crossing 50 miles below Kiev is apparently directed at the whole western half of the Ukraine and the Crimea. The third offensive, north of Kiev, continues to be the axis of the main advance, which has cleared all the area east of the Dnieper and is a most serious menace to the whole German front. . The Germans are now fighting on their last favourable line of defence, with their rear on the Russian frontiers, and if this fails they will probably find themselves compelled to execute another rapid retreat to the borderland of the Baltic republics, Poland and Rumania. The latest Russian offensive will have made it even more painfully evident to them that they cannot find enough troops to cope with the Russian situation, with the Western Allies advancing in force in the Mediterranean and awaiting the moment to advance in even greater force in Western Europe. Quite apart from what may be brewing in the west, it is- clear that the Mediterranean threat has now assumed a two-fold form. In the first place, powerful mechanised forces are pressing along the Italian peninsula, under a formidable air cover, and in the second place, the heel of Italy is like a springboard towards the Balkan coast, fifty miles away, where hundreds of thousands of patriots are awaiting liberation. It also must be remembered that Corsica, backed by Sardinia, projects like another springboard towards the heart of Northern Italy.