TERRIFIC FIGHT IN UKRAINE

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 8, 4 October 1941, Page 9

TERRIFIC FIGHT IN UKRAINE

Enemy Reinforcement In North LIMITED GAIN TOWARD CRIMEA

(Received October 3, 7 p.m.) LONDON, October 3. Except that the Russians have reported the recapture of four villages and a strategic hill in the vicinity of Starayerussa, 130 miles south of Leningrad, the latest information on the Russo-German operations is couched in only very general terms. Reports of local thrusts and counterattacks on fronts which extend for hundreds of miles give little idea of the fluctuations of fortunes unless they are relate# to place-names, but it is interesting that the Germans today admitted that he Russians have again attempted to cross the Dnieper, whereas previously they did their best to give the impression that the Soviet forces held no positions along the river.

German commentators also explained the slow progress of the Rumanians in the Odessa sector, “where the battlefields are littered ’’with the dead of both sides,” as due to the fact that the Russians still have much artillery which must first be overcome. A noteworthy sequel to the recent statement from the “Daily Telegraph’s” Stockholm correspondent that Marshal Bluecher is training a special winter army of 500,000 men in Siberia is a Berlin claim that a German jnfantry division has captured 500 Siberian soldiers in the past few days. Berlin adds that they were only recently transferred to the sector in which they were taken prisoner. Enemy Push Forestalled. It is reported that fierce battles have been raging for five days in one sector on the Leningrad front. The Russians are reported to have forestalled a German attack by 40 minutes and taken a strongly-fortified point. They followed up the attack with medium an'd heavy tanks and aircraft. It appears that the Russians, in firmly retaining Strelna, in the Leningrad zone, played havoc with the Germans, whose line of retreat was littered with piles of dead and equipment for several miles. One source reports that the Germans are rushing up reinforcements against Leningrad with such speed that there is no time to issue them with overcoats or form them into regiments. The war correspondent of the Italian newspaper “Corriere della Sera,” after seeing Leningrad’s fortifications, said: “The conquest of the Maginot Line appears to be child’s-play.” The independent French news agency says: "Germans who were taken prisoner at Leningrad do not possess overcoats. They were told that the war would be over before the autumn. Now they are shivering in trenches.” It adds that the Germans are sending up reinforcements to the front without having time to form them into regiments.

Long Way to Murmansk. There is no confirmation in London Of the Finnish claim to have captured Petrozavodsk. Reports throw doubt on the recent Finnish claim to have taken the White Sea port of Kandalaksha, on the Leningrad-Murmansk railwav. In the Murmansk sector, in appalling conditions of weather and country, the Germans are still trying to reach the port. British correspondents say that the Russians have beaten back German attacks on the line of the -River Liza, about 40 miles west of Murmansk. The Russian offensive on the central front resulted in the capture of the colours of the fifth German motorized infantry battalion and the destruction of 42 tanks and 8 guns. A German field post was captured in the vftinity of "Lake K.” In the Ukraine, tremendous fighting goes on as the Germans try to drive northward from the Dnieper Basin into the heart of the industrial area and southward down the Perekop Isthmus into the Crimea. It is learned in London that severe fighting continues on the approach to the Crimea, and the Germans are reported to have made slow progress, but they are still on the isthmus and have not reached the peninsula. Direct land communications between the Crimea and the rest of Russia are presumably cut, but there is still a line of communication open through the Sea of Azov. The Berlin news agency denied a Russian claim to have sunk a GOOO-ton cruiser in the Baltic Sea. A German communique reports:

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