HINT OF WINTER

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 64, 12 September 1942, Page 7

HINT OF WINTER

FIRST COLD RAINS

RUSSIANS TRY TO CUT OFF

WEDGES

(By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright.) LONDON, September 10. The Germans are stili creeping towards Stalingrad from the west, and today they claimed that the houses of the outer suburbs are within sight. Berlin radio claimed tonight that German troops are now fighting inside Stalingrad's inner defence belt.' A dispatch from Moscow reports that the first cold rains of autumn are sweeping the Stalingrad battlefield. The rain has ended the intense heat which had accompanied the bloody battles. It presages v/inter and conditions which will hamper the German mechanised armies. The Germans are pouring infantry into the gap they created by their tanks Avest of Stalingrad, says the Moscow correspondent of "The Times." Their losses are very heavy, but reinforcements are flowing in without check. "Whatever the ultimate result of this ceaseless, raging battle of attrition," the correspondent adds, "it will have made deep inroads into each side's operational reserves, which at this stage of the war cannot fail to have a permanent effect on its future course " SERIOUS WEDGE IN WEST. The all-day battle yesterday resulted in deep "wedges being established in the Russian lines. The Red Army is striving to repeat the operation whereby It transformed such wedges north-west and south-west of the city into sacks for the Germans, resulting in the destruction of 57 enemy tanks in the south-western section. The Moscow correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph" says that the new wedge in the west, in which two villages are held by the Germans, is perious, because the villages screen the Germans from armoured counterattacks by the Russians. A day-and-Hght bsttls on a grand scale has been raging incessantly for 60 hours along the routh-western arc. Russian infantry are holding the lines in spite of the heaviest bombing and shelling. Eussirn newspapers emphasise the cost to the Germans of the new wodge. tbr> losses including several dozen tanks, at least 200 infantry lorries, and thousands of killed. Moscow radio stated that Soviet