NEARER DEFEAT

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 71, 21 September 1943, Page 5

NEARER DEFEAT

FLEEING NAZI ARMIES

HITLER FACES DILEMMA

(By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright.) Rec. 1 p.m. LONDON, Sept. 20. The Red Army is pouring through gaps torn in the German lines and battering the outer defences of two of the most formidable German strongholds, Smolensk and Kiev. The swelling flood of Russian forces is now surging through the Yartsevo and Duchovschina gaps, but the concentration of men and armour of these main streams has not resulted in the slackening of pressure anywhere along the front. From north of Smolensk to the Sea of Azov the Germans are falling back at all points before relentless hammering.

Reuters Moscow correspondent says the Red Army is forcing the Germans nearer and nearer the brink of catastrophe. Any further retreat will entail the risk of the loss of Smolensk or Kiev, or both, and with them a major part of the German gains in two years of the bloodiest warfare.

The Soviet successes in the present summer offensive represent the greatest blow Hitler has ever sustained. They are even more disastrous for Hitler than Stalingrad. The Germans are now faced with a most serious dilemma. If they do not withdraw, the Red Army threatens them with a series of major and minor Stalingrads. If they do withdraw too quickly, they run the same risk of being completely overwhelmed. Meanwhile massed German reinforcements are being thrown into the land and air battle in a supreme effort to hold firm, but the Russians are steadily advancing in fulfilment of their grand strategic plan of alternatively hammering from the front and levering from the flanks. They are cracking up the most powerful garrisons.

STRONGEST LINES FALL.

The strongest fortifications which Todt's slave armies could produce are crumbling, continues Reuter. The roar of Russian artillery is drawing nearer to towns that have heard only the