HEADLONG PURSUIT

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 64, Issue 148, 3 April 1944, Page 3

HEADLONG PURSUIT

GERMANS FLEE IN ODESSA AREA DESPERATE DELAYING ACTION. RUSSIAN ADVANCE ON LWOW. (N.Z. Tress Association—Copyright.! (Rec. 12.15 p.m.) LONDON. April 2.

The Russian ' advance against Odessa has developed into a headlong pursuit of' fleeing Germans, says Reuter’s correspondent at Moscow. Russian tanks and Cossack motor-cyclists, brushing aside futile counter-attadks, are racing eastwards through pelting rain and deep slush toward the doomed -port. Two other columns are simultaneously moving down at great speed from the north-east and north.

The first Ukrainian Army under Marshal Zhukov, operating at the other end of the southern front, is again pivoting toward Lwow, which lias become the key for a general I vanee toward the Carpathians. The Russians, striking across a dense net- ! work of German communications, are I now within 50 miles of Lwow, as close as they were during the earlier push north-west of Tarnopol. The battle for Tarnopol may soon be resumed at full l'ury. The Germans are fighting a desperate delaying action to hold, open the escape corridor for the Odessa garrison and the armies still east of the Dniester. They are sometimes sacrificing whole units. Scenes familiar in other German retreats are being re-enacted on the roads to Odessa, where German plans for defence have apparently been thrown into complete confusion by concentric Russian attacks preventing defensive concentration at any one point. Heaps of German dead lie beside smashed tanks and thousands of German lorries have been captured.