NAZI BASTION GONE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 2, 4 January 1943, Page 5

NAZI BASTION GONE

VEOKIE LUKFS FALL

--<■-• LONDON, January 3. With the capture of Velikie : Liikt by the Russians, the German armies have lost one of their four main bastions on the central front. Velikie Luki was taken at the bayonet point. The Russians began to storm the city at dawn, 1 with: a hurricane of artillery and mortar fire, after which masses of infantry and tanks poured through breaches in the fortifications. ■ Russian artillerymen took guns deep into the defences and silenced, forts and machine-gun nests with' direct fire. The- next phase was a series of savage, street battles. The Germans resisted from house to house as the Russians'attacked under smoke-screens. Th,e"lited Army captured an order signed- by General Snerer threatening that" any German who ceased fighting wourd-tbe shot and his family penalised;"- ■"•:•:: ■ ■ ■ • - ■ ■ ■ ' The-once handsome city is changed beyoftd. recognition. Libraries, hos-pitals^-club houses, colleges, and school? are destroyed. Only women land -children were left. They crept from cellars to greet the Red Army. Reuters Moscow correspondent say£ the capture of Velikie Luki places the ■Russians astride the' Sokolniki-Rzhev-Moscow railway, one of the main Gertnan supply lines from the Reich, via Riga,-- at a more westerly point than previously reached. The Russians now have the possibility "of thrusting west against Sokol" Juki, on" the Leningrad-Vitebsk railJvay<»Herr Hitler's principal rail link between Leningrad and the central front, «t German chances of holding Jtzhevj. through the remaining three months of the winter are greatly lessened. Berlin radio denied that Velikie Luki had. fallen and added that almost all gectdrs' on the eastern front were comparatively calm, with only local engagements at Terek, on the Kalmuk Steppes, and between the Volga and the.:Qon.