MEANING OF SUCCESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 7, 10 January 1944, Page 5

MEANING OF SUCCESS

NAZI DEFENCE COLLAPSING

Rec. noon. RUGBY, Jan. 9. The capture of Kirovograd and the Russian advance beyond the town in the general direction of Nikolaev place the Germans holding the Krivoi Rog and Nikopol positions in extreme danger. It is still pointed out in Lon- ! don that there is no sign yet of the Germans abandoning these positions despite what the Russians describe as a break-through and what the Germans call an avalanche. The speculation in London Sunday newspapers is that Hitler is not concerned so much now with the loss of the iron from Krivoi Rog or about manganese as with the disastrous effect of the wholesale evacuation of southern Russia on the morale of his Balkan satellites and the possible loss of the Ploesti oilfields. ' Military correspondents almost unanimously agree that the loss of Kirovograd means that the German Dnieper bend defences are collapsing. The "Sunday Times," while pointing out that the Battle of the Ukraine is not yet over, says that Mannstein must have more troops or he is finished. POISED IN BALANCE. "The whole scene recalls strongly those moments in the battles of the past when fate hung poised between defeat and disaster. It seems to the onlooker that with a little more pres-i sure the fabric of the German defence! will fall to pieces. It has happened on the borders of Poland and is not far away, so far as one can judge from a- distance, in the vital area of Vinnitsa and Zhmarinka." The "Observer" says that m southeast Europe the Russian advance has created a political turmoil and conditions bordering on panic in the satellite countries —"the puppet Governments and their followers now watching the Russian advance towards Bessarabia and Bukovina as a shipwrecked mariner on a reef would watch the I rise of the tide which will inevitably sweep him away."