FROM HILL TO HILL

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 30, 4 August 1943, Page 5

FROM HILL TO HILL

HOW ADVANCE WAS MADE Rec. 12.45 p.m. RONDON, August 3. Correspondents .tell graphic stories of how the British troops who captured the mountain town of Centuripe, six miles from this road around Etna, had to storm prepared defences over a series of ridges ajid cross a bare slope under machine-gran fire.

Reuters correspondent with the Eighth Army sajre there is not a single hill that is not, covered by machineguns and snipejrs from at least four other heights, each of which had to be dealt with by our storming parties, one after another. As they neared Centuripe the,' British faced a ridge surmounted toy "a limestone outcrop, behind which 200 enemy parachutists were concealed. The parachutists cause-f! a lot of trouble before they were cleared out.

The British then faced a still higher ridge, oveftoijiped by a pinnacle. The German resistance was bitter, but the British went ahead with the final assault. They gained a foothold in the town on Sijqnday night, but were forced out by. a determined counterattack.

WENT IJN" A SECOND TIME

They refqsmed and went in again, and finally' carried Centuripe before dawn. An Associated Press correspondent says that tbte fight which took General Montgomery's tired and dusty warriors up the stecjjp rocky slopes was a dirty, grim, and bloody affair, waged from rock to rock with grenades, tommyguns, and rifles. The Nazi machinegunners and snipers fought desperately, but the assault force edged -forward stumbling over the trackless slopes. Eeuter reports that San Stefano was an empty ruined fishing village when the American patrols crept cautiously in. San JEJtefano had been shelled from land and,' sea and bombed from the aii*, and the Germans had put the finishing touches to it with dynamite and then laid, mines on a bigger scale than anywhere else, so far in Sicily.