RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 234, 4 October 1943, Page 5

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE

FULL FORCE MAINTAINED DESPERATE GERMAN OPPOSITION (Ry Telpjraph—rre«B Association—Copyright) Recd. 11.5 p.m. Loudon, 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 weather slows down operations, says Reuter’s Moscow correspondent. The Russians in their drive toward Vitebsk have taken Bcrsino, a small place of considerable tactical importance. They are advancing- from Bersino, outflanking Lesno, on the Smolensk-Vitebsk railway, 10 miles further north and only 25 miles from Vitebsk.

The Observer’s Stockholm correspondent says the German High Command is pouring tanks and infantry reinforcements into' the line guarding the vital Vitebsk-Mohilev-Gomel railway in a desperate attempt to stop the Russians sweeping over White Russia.

If Vitebsk falls tlic way to Riga will be open and the whole Ger-man-Leningrad front may have to fall back. The Moscow communique says the Russians in the Taman Peninsula captured the strongly fortified strongpoints of Staraya Titaroskaya, 10 miles south of Temryuk, and also Krasnaya Streia and Vozrohdenie, and in the Gomel sector advanced 6 to 9' miles. They occupied over 50 in- | habited places, including Strumen, 50 , miles north of Gomel. The Red Army in the Mohilev sector advanced 6 to 9 miles and occupied more than 270 inhabited places, I including the district centre of Driben. I 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 Mohilev. The Red Army also made a further crossing of the Goj River below Chernikov.

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

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

The Stockholm Tidningen’s Berlin correspondent, quoting a German front-line reporter, indirectly admits that the retreating German armies are carrying out mass deportations ’of Russian civilians, saying: "A gigantic migration is,going on in eastern and western Ukrane, where 1,000,000 Russian peasants in horse-drawn carts, with their wives and children, are moving westward.”