WaybackWire

MOSCOW, Wednesday.—The Red Army’s counter-offensive has broken the German lines northwest and south of Stalingrad, and both railway lines that supplied the besiegers are reported cut.

The attack opened with a one-hour artillery barrage, and then infantry and tanks went forward. “Battles unparalleled in world history have been raging,” Pravda said.

In the first days of the drive Russian advances averaged 6 to 12 miles a day northwest of the city and 9 to 12 southwest of it, and the deepest penetration reported was at Chernyshevskaya, on the Chir River, 125 miles west. Inside Stalingrad the defenders have broken through the German wedge that divided the city and joined their forces.

By the Russian report, German killed and captured have mounted to more than 116,500 since the offensive opened on 19 November. “The Stalingrad offensive continues relentlessly and unceasingly over snowy fields littered with the wreckage of tanks and guns, and corpses,” Radio Moscow said.

Pravda has printed the diary of Erich Mueller, a German non-commissioned officer killed northwest of Stalingrad. One entry reads: “The road to Stalingrad may be called the road of the dead.”

BERLIN, Wednesday.—After 19 November the German High Command admitted that German and Rumanian troops were fighting heavy defensive battles south of Stalingrad and in the Don loop, and the communique said “counter measures are proceeding”.

The Berlin radio said: “Soviet operations appear to be an attempt indirectly to assist the Anglo-American front, by pinning down German forces,” and claimed American and British-made tanks destroyed at Stalingrad for the first time.

Now field dispatches reaching Lisbon say the Soviet offensives have failed to crack the German defences, and the High Command claims the Soviets lost more than 1,300 tanks from 20 to 30 November, Domei reports in the Japanese-run Syonan Shimbun. A Berlin military spokesman told Swedish correspondents, Reuters reports in the Indian Express of Madras: “The Russian offensive at Stalingrad has reached its absolute peak.”

MOSCOW, Wednesday.—A second Russian offensive is under way on the central front, where the Red Army is reported at the gates of Novosokolniki, 60 miles from the Latvian border.

“In the region south of Kalinin and in the sector southeast and west of Toropets the enemy started an expected attack November 25 on a broad front,” the German communique said.

Pravda describes a steady Red Army advance west of Rzhev. A Berlin military spokesman told Swedish correspondents that the greatest tank battle of the war is being fought between Kalinin and Toropets, and a spokesman in Berlin has also admitted that the situation on the central front is very grave.

Hitler is reported to have ordered Rzhev held. Red Star says he telegraphed his commander there that “the loss of Rzhev is equal to the loss of half of Berlin.”

MOSCOW, Saturday 7 November.—A second front will come sooner or later, being no less essential for the Allies than for Russia, Premier Stalin said last night, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the revolution.

Addressing Moscow members of the Communist party in a secret meeting place, he said that because there was no second front the Germans had been able to use 240 divisions, more than 3,000,000 men, and so drive 300 miles deeper into Russia. German documents, he said, showed the plan of advance: Stalingrad by 25 July, Saratov by 9 August, Kuibyshev by 15 September, Baku by 29 September. Of these he said: “Their summer plans appear to have failed.”

In today’s order of the day he put enemy casualties at more than 8,000,000 and said the German legions, diluted with Rumanians, Hungarians, Italians and Finns, would soon feel fresh Red Army blows. The tasks he set: hold the present defences, wear the enemy down, prepare for the offensive and fan guerrilla warfare in the German rear. “We can and must clear the Hitlerite filth from our Soviet soil,” he said.

MUNICH, Sunday 8 November.—Hitler, speaking in Munich tonight, explained his failure to take Stalingrad by saying the city was not worth a second Verdun.

It was not possible to achieve successes every week, he said. “What is necessary is that we should hold what we have. On that you can depend.”

He added: “One or two worlds must fall. We will not fall, consequently others must fall.”