VIOLENT BATTLES RAGING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 October 1943, Page 4

VIOLENT BATTLES RAGING

FOR MELITOPOL AND GOMEL Defences Cracked Wide Open FURTHER RED ARMY SUCCESSES KIEV IN THROES OF EVACUATION (By Telegraph —Press Association—Extraordinary.) (Received This Day, 12.50 pan.) LONDON, October 14. Never since Germany attacked Russia has the Red Army had such a series of potential successes in prospect. The defences of Melitopol and Gomel are cracked wide open, and street fighting- is raging for their final seizure, while Kiev itself is apparently in the throes of evacuation. The Russian summer offensive has become merged into a vast autumn battle, says Reuter’s Moscow correspondent. Melitopol, the vital railway station astride the main escape route from Crimea, is being cleared street by street and in house-to-house fighting. Vicious battles are still being fought in the centre of Melitopol, but the Germans are being wrenched from their last positions. The Russians are throwing in everything tc liquidate Melitopol because the capture of the city would not only destroy the main rail escape route from the Crimea but would enable Red Army tanks to sweep unhampered across the Togaisk steppe between Melitopol and the Sea of Azov to close up the Crimea by land from the north. The Germans are resisting desperately on the Melitopol front and have counterattacked as many as seventeen times daily. Melitopol is a living inferno with hundreds of buildings aflame. The battle for the Dnieper from its confluence with the Pripet to the Melitopol area is being maintained in intensity. The Red Army is ferrying troops across the Dnieper at a greater daily rate than ever. The Russians now have dozens of strongly built pontoon bridges across the Dnieper capable of carrying the heaviest tanks to the west bank, north and south of Kiev.