CRASHING FORWARD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25347, 4 October 1943, Page 5

CRASHING FORWARD

RED ARMY OFFENSIVE

VITEBSK THREATENED

DESPERATE NAZI MOVES

(United Press Association) (By Electric Telegraph—Copyright)

(Rec. 0.30 a.m.) LONDON, Oct. 3. The Red Army is making herculean efforts to maintain the full force of its offensive and smash the Germans’ White Russian line before the feather slows down operations, says Reuter’s Moscow correspondent. The Russians, in the drive towards Vitebsk, have taken Bersino, a small place of considerable tactical importance. They are advancing from Bersino, outflanking Lfesno, on the SmolenskVitebsk railway, 10 miles further north and only 25 miles from Vitebsk.

Observers in Stockholm say that the German High Command is pouring tanks and infantry reinforcements into the line guarding the vital Vitebsk-Mogilev-Gomel railway in a desperate attempt to stop the Russians from sweeping over White Russia. If Vitebsk falls the way to Riga will be open and the whole of the German Leningi’ad front may have to fall back.

A Moscow communique says the Russians in Taman Penin*ula have captured the strongly-fortified strong-points of Straya and Titaroskaya, 10 miles south of Temryuk, as well as Krasnaya, Strela, and Vozrozhdenie, and in the Gomel sector they have advanced six to nine miles and occupied over 50 inhabited places, including Strumen, 50 miles north of Gomel. The Red Army ,in the Mogilev sector advanced six to nine miles and occupied more than 270 inhabited places, including the district centre of Driben. Leading units of General Popov’s mechanised forces pierced the centre of the German White Russian line and reached the east bank of the Ipronya River, 25 miles east of Mogilev. The Red Army has also made a further grossing of the Soj River below Chernikov.

Axis quarters state that more than 250,000 Russians are making a bold effort to cut off the Crimea by a drive on a wide front in the Militopol and Zaporozhe areas. One Berlin report states that the Russian drive in the hilly country between the two towns is the heaviest of the summer campaign. The evacuation of the town of Taman is admitted.

Vichy radio says that the intervention of heavy German tanks has so far frustrated the attempt to cut off the Crimea.

The Berlin correspondent of the Stockholm newspaper Tidningen quotes a German- front-line reporter for an indirect admission that the retreating German armies are carrying out mass deportations of Russian civilians. “A gigantic migration,” the reporter writes, “is going on in the Eastern and Western Ukraine, where 1,0Q0,000 Russian peasants in horse-drawn carts, with their wives and children, are moving westward.”