MAY BE CUT OFF

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 65, 14 September 1943, Page 5

MAY BE CUT OFF

GERMANS' DANGER

- LONDON, September 13. The fighting on all three Italian battlefronts constitutes a co-ordinated Allied offensive,, That is why the ,Ger- ; mans arc fighting so hard at Salerno. If they cannot hold out there there is a real possibility of their troops further south being cut off. A correspondent who landed with the Fifth Army, in a cable message last Friday from the Salerno battlefront, gave a picture of the battlefront which is probably descriptive of the ding-dong battles that have been going on since. He says that the Germans started off with-, a big mistake. They should have made a concentrated tank attack is the early stages of the landing before the Allied guns had been got ashore in any number. Such an attack was expected, but it never came. The enemy thus lost his best chance of nipping the landing in the bud. But the Germans were not by any means unprepared. From the beaches right back to the rugged hills inland they •were in prepared defence positions. They had plenty of their deadly 88mm guns carefully placed and ready, along with many machine-gun nests . and sniper positions in ditches, orchards, and hedges. All this was in close country, extremely easy to defend, and the Germans made the best use of every opportunity. In fact, he says, there are snipers dug in everywhere, holding out in some of the country that has been captured, and our men are steadily weeding them out.. He says the greatest credit must go to the Allied airmen. Although Salerno is at the extreme limit of fighter range from the nearest air bases in Sicily, they have managed day and night to keep an air umbrella over our forces. It has taken them many hundreds of aircraft to do this, because Spitfires can spend only 20 minutes at a time over the front and Lightnings about an hour

The latest news of the, Salerno fighting comes in a dispatch from a correspondent at Algiers, who says that the 'Fifth Army is more than holding its ground, with the battle now seemingly at its highest pitch.