SILESIAN TOWNS

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 March 1945, Page 5

SILESIAN TOWNS

CAPTURED BY RUSSIANS

ALSO MANY MEN AND GUNS RUGBY, March 22.

[ Big Russian gains m Upper Silesia, including the capture of the road and rail centre, and industrial town of Oppeln, are announced, in the following order of the day, by Mr. Stalin; “Troops of the First Ukrainian Front ■ having broken into, the enemy’s de- ' fences west and south of Oppeln advanced 25 miles in each direction, and ousted the German army grouping in the area south-west of Oppem. As a result of this fighting, troops of this front captured up to 15,000 Germans, 464 guns, a great quantity of other weapons and war material...... ■ “In the course of the' offensive,' troops captured in Silesia, the towns or Neustadt, Cosel, Steinau, Zuelz, Krapitz, Ober-Glogau and Falkenberg, as well as 400 other inhabited localities.” STETTIN AND KONIGSBERG LONDON, March 22, The Gernfan News Agency ■ said: A great battle for Stettin bridgehead began on Thursday morning, after a violent Russian artillery barrage. The battle is very savage. The Russians have thrown in huge forces. against Stettin in an effort to capture intact bridges near the Oder’s mouth, stated the Berlin radio. Germans are retreating step by step to take up more favourable positions. ’ Soviet planes are bombing Konigsberg all day long, and all night long. Marshal Vassilevski’s. troops around Konigsberg have overrun three more German defence lines. The German pocket is compressed to such a nar-* row space that at no point is it deeper than three miles. A Moscow “Red Star” war reporter said that the battle for the liquidation of the Konigsberg grouping was nearing an end, An infantry division of so-called battle groups was melting away completely exhausted. Dead Germans littered steets, fields, and ditches in such numbers that Russian sappers in one village were compelled to clear streets before vehicles could pass.

CLEAN-UP DRIVES KONIEV-ZHUKOV PLANS LONDON, March 22. Koniev’s drive cleans up the corner of Upper Silesia, where mines and industries are situated, and has also consolidated his left flank, which is now based on the Sudeten Mountains (Neustadt lies in the foothills) and strengthens his position as regards the Moravian Gap into Czechoslovakia, states Reuter’s military correspondent. His thrust has given him a number of places along the railway which from Katowice cuts across the southern tip of Upper Silesia.

Reuter’s Moscow (correspondent says that observers point to the intensive movement of the Red Army troops, tanks and guns to the Oder front, coupled with artillery duek and bitter air fighting, as indicating that Zhukov will strike soon. Meantime, the Russians are firing katuskas, which are multi-barrelled rocket mortars, at Danzig. Their range is being directed from newlywon hill positions. More than 50 miles farther east the resistance of the Germans trapped south-west of Konisberg has reached cracking point. A crack tank division which has been trying to force a way from the East Prussia pocket lost most of its tanks and guns. The Hermann Goering Division shared the same fate. The slaughter has been tremendous. Special Russian squads were detailed to clear the streets choked with German dead, before the Soviet tanks and guns could advance. . A Moscow radio emphasised that the Soviet offensive in Upper Silesia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary- is threatening the Germans’ largest munitions concerns —the Hermann Goering works—which are situated in Austria and Czechoslovakia. “The Times’s” Moscow correspondent says: By dawn on the morning of March 22, the Germans hao been driven within four miles of the Frischeshaff. Everywhere along the twelve to fifteen miles strip of East Prussian soil, (Soviet planes, all day yesterday, were over this tiny paten and they bombed and strafed Heiligenbeil and the wharves on riis chcshaff. Soviet tanks and infantry, advancing in small detachments across the flooded countryside, ids violent resistance at some One German garrison, rejecting demands for capitulation, fought untn not a man was alive or uninjured.

“EXTRAORDINARY STRENGTH”

(Ree. 12.15 p.nK) oNDON March 22 Russian troops smashed a big new breach through the German lines covering Austria, says the Butish United Press correspondent. Reuter points out that at least 60 per cent of Germany’s war production is now concentrated in the areas ol Austria and Czechoslovakia which the Russian offensives in Hungary and Upper Silesia are now directly threatening. • . The Berlin radio war reporter says that Russian forces in a full scale assault on Stettin were “extraordinary, even considering the scale ol the previous deployments of the Red Army strength on the East Front.” A Pravda despatch from advanced positions overlooking Danzig said that enemy forces were sheltering in the woods around Danzig. Murderous Russian fire was smashing sporadic counter-at-tacks Another Pravda correspondent in a despatch date-lined ‘'Berlin highway” said he could see in the cloudless sky British bombers banking for a bomb run on Berlin. A Moscow message says that the Polish President, thanking the First Polish Army to reach the Baltic, saio: “We are standing on the Baltic coast and will never move from it. A new democratic Poland will have Danzig, Gdynia, and Stettin to connect it with the"'outside world. We won’t be satisfied as we were before September, 1939, with a Polish corridor.”

' POLISH CLAIMS LONDON, March 22. Referring to Poland in his Diocesan publication, the Archbishop of Canterbury said: “I share in practical unanimity that at the Yalta Conference, claims both of justice and of expediency were satisfied. But fears remain. Everything depends on the way in which effect shall be given to the principles that ■were adopted,. There is great responsibility. It rests upon both the Russians and the Poles.