UNBROKEN FRONT

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 5, 8 January 1944, Page 5

UNBROKEN FRONT

GERMANS' PRIMARY AIM

LONDON, January 7. "We shall not hold Russian territory merely for reasons of prestige," a German* military spokesman told the Stockholm Telegraph Bureau's Berlin correspondent. "If circumstances force a total retreat from Russia this would be a secondary consideration," added the spokesman. "Our first aim is to maintain an unbroken front." The correspondent interprets the statement as indicating that a new ! large-scale German retreat is imminent. ■"Pravda" says that the most important result of General Vatutin's Kiev offensive has been the rout of crack German tank divisions, including the Hermann Goering and Das Reich Divisions. This, it says, "is particularly significant, as these divisions admitted only real Germans —genuine Nazis trained in murder and taught to hold out in the darkest hour." Their losses have been so large that only six or eight men remained in some companies. A front-line correspondent in a dispatch to "Isvestia" says: "I have not seen a single position, road, trench, or foot of soil in the path of our troops advancing beyond Zhitomir and Berdichev that does not bear traces of our shells. The voice of war can be heard everywhere as ever-growing columns of Russian guns and infantry march down the roads." Vichy radio says that heavy fighting is going on in the Vitebsk area in addition to the entire Dnieper bend- The centre of gravity of the fighting is the area west of Zhitomir.