FIERCE FIGHT GOES ON

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 145, 16 December 1942, Page 5

FIERCE FIGHT GOES ON

NAZI RESISTANCE

LONDON, December 14. The unabated fierceness with which the Germans are fighting on all fronts is one of the outstandingl features of the latest dispatches from Moscow. The Germans are still counter-attacking with undiminishcd persistency, specially on the central front. Correspondents, nevertheless, stress that the Russians generally are able to advance. The Stockholm correspondent of "The Times" says that the balance on the Velikie Luki-Rzhev stretch since last Thursday appears now to be more distinctly in the Russians' favour than it was in the preceding days. . . This does not indicate striking changes, but merely that the Russians are maintaining the initiative, which the Germans last week were disputing in several localities. The chief and steadiest Russian progress, though slow, is apparently in the area pi Byeloi (south-west of Rzhev), and in the neighbourhood of Velizh (80 miles north-west of ■ Smolensk). The Germans are continually but unsuccessfully flinging in more tanks and manpower in other sectors. An. important development on the southern front is a German counterstroke against the Russians who are holding the Stalingrad-Kuban railway in the region of Kotelnikovo, where, according to "The Times" correspondent in Moscow, the Wehrmacht is making its heaviest assault so far in the attempt to relieve yon Hoth's entrapped divisions. Russian artillery took the first shock of the counterblow, halting the adj vance. German tanks almost immedi- ! ately resumed the onslaught, but were repulsed. _______________