NEW MOVES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 October 1943, Page 3

NEW MOVES

POSSIBLE IN CAMPAIGN IN MEDITERRANEAN POSITION IN ITALY & BALKANS PROBLEMS FOR ENEMY & ALLIES. OUTLOOK IN THE BALKANS. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.35 a.m.) RUGBY, October 28. Including German troops in the Aegean Islands, Allied forces in the Mediterranean are containing and fighting over 40 German divisions. As General Alexander recently stated, the number of German divisions in Italy and the Balkans alone is between 35 and 40. General Alexander’s army group m Italy alone is fighting its way forward through country all o' which is eminently suitable for defence, being very steep and bnoken. The weather is becoming foul. The Mediterranean front, however, needs to be regarded as a whole. The fact that the British right flank rests on the Adriatic, covering the ports of Bari and Brindisi and the airfields of Foggia, compels the Germans to occupy all the Dalmatian ports and to exert themselves continually against the swarming Yugoslav patriots. The mere fact of the Allied advance into Italy enabled and encouraged the patriots to increase their activities. They have now largely severed the communications of the German troops garrisoning the Balkans, forcing the enemy to resort to supply by sea. This method, under the eyes of the Allied air and naval forces in the Adriatic, is clearly precarious and wasteful. The possession of the Foggia airfields also gives British and American bombers and fighters a first-class base for exercising their air superiority against South German and Austrian industries and communications .whenever the weather serves. The occupation of Southern Italy reacts on the west as well as the cast Mediterranean situation. By landing near Naples the Allies manoeuvred the Germans out of Sardinia and Corsica. Fighter airfields in Corsica provide a cover for operations in the north-east, against Pisa and Leghorn, in the north against Genoa and in the north-west against Nice, should General Alexander decide to take advantage of it . The possibility of a German counter-offensive in Italy 'is not ruled out. Until the ports in Allied hands are fully developed for supplying large armies, the Germans, working on interior lines, are in a position to send divisions to the front faster than the Allies. Before doing so, however, they must decide whether they can spare the troops from othei actual operational fronts. They must also weigh the risks of hostile Italian action against their lengthy and inadequate communications and of Allied bombing of the same communications. The difficulties of supplying an Army in Central Italy from Germany are very great. The difficulties .of supplying" the Allied armies are also great, but are diminishing.

A Yugoslav communique reports that a strong German detachment which landed on the island of Brae, near Split, on October 21, has been routed. German attacks on liberated regions of the Sanjak and Montenegro have been repulsed. In Slovenia, also, German motorised units failed to regain ground. German tanks Which got as far as Novomesto were cut off, encircled and suffered heavy losses. Towns on the Yugoslav-Italian frontier were raided by Partisans, who destroyed railways and a factory and cut telephone communication with Ljubljana.