DEFENCES BROKEN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25429, 10 January 1944, Page 3

DEFENCES BROKEN

TRIPLE SOVIET DRIVE A DANGEROUS THREAT (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, Jan. 8. The enemy’s tJkraine defences are now hopelessly broken. The Germans are suffering huge losses, and, ill-equipped to fight a winter campaign, are falling back along a 200-mile front. The magnitude of the German losses is more apparent with every mile of Russian advance. The enemy’s armoured forces are suffering terrible blows. The British United Press reports that one of General Vatutin’s columns, moving west from Rokitno, is already within 25 miles of Sarny, where the railways from Leningrad, Riga, Warsaw, and Vilna converge. Other parts of his force have mopped up 30 miles of the Korosten-Sarny railway as far as Gorodnitsa. General Vatutin meanwhile is consolidating the Red Army’s advance in the Ukraine behind the spearhead piercing Poland. The Russians in the Ukraine are maintaining three drives —first, pushing on along the railway from Berdichev to Shepetovka, which is the key position for a direct drive against Rovno; secondly, thrusting towards Vinnitsa and Merinka, which are the key to the Germans' supply system in the area they still hold in South Russia; thirdly, curling back from Byelaya Tserkov south-east towards the Cherkassy region, where the 10 German divisions on the west bank of the Dnieper, if they hold their ground, run grave risk of encirclement.

The Moscow correspondent of The Times says that in none of the offensives so far has the Red Army possessed in its immediate rear such a good network of communications as it has gained in the Ukraine, where, in the capricious • winter, cross-country operations are highly dangerous. The Red Army is benefiting from what was apparently a major German blunder —the concentration of armour at Jitomir and the subsequent retreat to the west away from the southern sectors, where so much is now needed. Reuter’s correspondent says that he has not met a Russian who can remember such freak weather with days of thaw in January, which is generally the middle of a severe winter, but it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. The thaws are revealing land mines which the Germans have hidden under the snow, making the Red Army sappers’ work easier.