The Pittsburgh Press (October 9, 1942)
STALINGRAD’S PERIL GROWS, REDS ADMIT
‘We quit trying to storm city,’ Berlin says, but Russians reveal Nazi flanking drive and German gains inside Volga citadel
Despite the German High Command’s announcement that the Nazis have given up attempts to take Stalingrad by storm, the Russians reported today that the Germans had gained in heavier attacks inside the city and had started a flanking drive threatening Soviet positions far south of the city.
Bloodier fight, Moscow says
By Henry Shapiro, United Press staff writer
Moscow, USSR –
Front dispatches reported today that the Soviet position in the northwest section of Stalingrad has “deteriorated” somewhat, and revealed that a German column 100 miles southeast of the Volga city has launched a flanking drive into the Kalmyk Steppes.
The Soviet reports took a less optimistic view of the Stalingrad situation and sharply challenged Nazi propaganda statements that the land assault on Stalingrad had been abandoned in favor of siege warfare.
The reported German progress in the Kalmyk Steppes was the first report of action in that sector for several weeks. The steppes lie due east of Kotelnikovsky, center of heavy fighting when the Germans first began the approach Stalingrad.
Threaten to flank Reds
Front dispatches said that the Nazi drive threatened to flank the Russian positions northward, including the southern anchor positions protecting Stalingrad.
The movement of Russian reinforcements and supplies up to the battered positions inside the city on the west bank of the Volga was said to be hampered by heavy pounding of the river crossing by German aircraft.
Stalingrad reports said the Germans had not changed their tactics on the front and that Nazi assertions to that effect were contradicted by all battle reports received from the fighting zone.
These reports said that the Germans were attacking with “superior numbers” in the northwestern part of Stalingrad and that Soviet defense forces were under very heavy pressure to halt the Nazi thrust toward the Volga. It was the 46th day of the Battle of Stalingrad.
Panzers hurried back
Another Nazi assault was developing south of Stalingrad where two tank columns were nosing forward.
Yesterday, the Germans occupied two streets in the industrial settlement of Stalingrad. They paid with the lives of 4,000 men and 16 tanks for it, the record blood sacrifice in one of history’s greatest battles.
Twelve tanks and 500 troops penetrated another street of the settlement today. Nine of the tanks were destroyed, two companies of troops killed, and the surviving tanks and Germans retreated.
Earlier, south of Stalingrad, two Panzer columns and a heavy force of German Tommy-gunners tried to drive parallel wedges into Soviet defenses and encircle a large unit. The Russians crippled 34 of the tanks and flung the enemy back.
Timoshenko still gaining
Above Stalingrad, in the 50-mile corridor between the Don and Volga Rivers, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s counteroffensive rolled slowly and steadily forward to the relief of the city’s defenders.
Timoshenko’s men were rooting out and killing Germans who had resorted to trench warfare in an effort to stop him. The Germans were ceaselessly counterattacking.
The government organ, Izvestia, reported that fires inside the city were visible for miles beyond the steppe land, that heavy smoke was saturating men’s clothing and favoring their food.
The burning city supplies the only warmth in increasingly cold nights. The din of collapsing buildings mingled with the roar of cannonading. Clouds of dust covered the city, and explosions blew thousands of bricks hundreds of feet into the air.
But all dispatches said the defenders, under Gen. Rodimtsev, showed no indications of weakening, and were stubbornly defending every house, courtyard and street corner.
The British Exchange Telegraph Agency reported that the Russians were using light mail service planes, known as U-2s, to bomb German strongholds inside Stalingrad. The planes were flying alone and very low, so they could drop a bomb on a German-held house and blow it up, without hurting Russians in an adjoining house.
Apparently, the Germans had been checked again in the Mozdok area of the Eastern Caucasus, where they were making a great effort to drive to the Grozny oil fields, 50 or 60 miles away.
Check Nazis in Caucasus
But the dispatches reported that they were maintaining their pressure there looking for weak spots where they could attack in force.
The Russians smashed seven successive attacks in the Mozdok area yesterday and improved positions on one sector. Soviet long-range artillery smashed a whole enemy regiment and destroyed 20 tanks.
Southeast of Novorossiysk, the Black Sea naval base the Russians gave up three weeks AGO, German and Romanian units counterattacked in an effort to regain positions from which the Russians had driven them. Dispatches said the Germans were displeased with the performance of the Romanians, who had been badly battered.
A communiqué reported German attacks repulsed on the northwestern front, probably in the Sinyavino area, some 20 miles southeast of Leningrad, and on the Central Front, opposite Moscow.
Volga fleet pounds Nazis
Dispatches reported that gunboats of the Volga River fleet and big cannon, mounted on barges, were supporting both the defenders of Stalingrad and Timoshenko’s counteroffensive.
Day and night, this floating artillery shelled German concentrations and guns and broke up attacks before they could get started. Several days ago, gunboats and barge-mounted cannon were rushed up the Volga to prepare the war for a big Russian attack. They demolished German fortifications and Soviet infantry advanced and seized strategic positions.
As regards big German losses, Radio Moscow reviewed the list of German high army officers who had been killed in Russia lately. They included Gens. Kliev and Felenkamp; Gen. Bermut, Chief of Staff of a tank army corps; Gen. Schultz; Lt. Gen. Britonov; Gen. Kapke, commander of the German 295th Division; Gen. Mack, commander of the 23rd Tank Division, and Divisional Gens. Buck and Wertsch.
Hitler changes his mind
By C. R. Cunningham, United Press staff writer
London, England –
Informed military quarters cautioned today against overoptimism regarding German announcements that their tactics had been changed at Stalingrad, and warned that this did not necessarily mean that the enemy would retire to the Don River.
One source said:
It is not an indication of a likely German withdrawal or that they are not able to take Stalingrad, but it indicates that the price of the assault is getting very high.
The British Press Association reported that some German troops have already been withdrawn from the Stalingrad Front and it was believed that the German High Command might be contemplating heavy operations on other sections of the long Russian Front.
High Command ignores situation
Although the German communiqué ignored the entire Stalingrad situation today for the first time, Russian reports told of renewed and ferocious attacks there, Berlin radio commentators continued references to the Stalingrad fighting, telling of advances against “enemy nests of resistance” within the city and heavy aerial operations.
Supporting the theory that the German offensive might flare on other sectors, the official German news agency said in broadcasts heard here:
By the end of the week, local [Berlin] military circles will consider it appropriate to state that the situation in all main points of the Eastern Front has changed in such a way that the initiative is absolutely with the German Command. Attacks of local character are being launched by German and Axis troops in all these places.
A ‘war of position’
A German announcement said the situation on the Central Front west of Moscow had changed almost overnight from a war of movement to a war of position.
This implied that, after changing its attack tactics in Stalingrad “to avoid unnecessary shedding of German blood,” the situation on the Moscow Front had suddenly become one in which prime attention was being paid to static defensive warfare.
The German announcements were in direct contrast to Russian communiqués and front dispatches which said that the Germans were attacking with intensified fury at Stalingrad, throwing their men by thousands into the Red Army meatgrinder, and that they were attacking with tanks and infantry on the Moscow Front and were on the offensive also at Leningrad.
Fall rains soak front
Berlin quoted its High Command as authority for the statement that on the Central Front, the Russians after weeks of creeping up by thousands on German positions had now retired to deep underground defenses. It was added that fall rains were soaking the front.
Whatever their truth or purport, Allied quarters hailed the German announcements regarding Stalingrad as an implicit admission that Adolf Hitler had failed to make good his unequivocal promise to take the city by storm.
Military quarters believed that the admissions might portend either a desperate German offensive in another direction or a gigantic swing of forces to the west to forestall the opening of a second front.
The German admissions were echoed by an Italian statement in the weekly fascist publication L’Azione Coloniale which said that it was “absurd and impossible” to expect Italian forces to control the vast area of southern Libya and by a Jap claim of a big victorying New Guinea which constituted a tacti admission that the Japs had been pushed back 40 miles.
Abandon frontal assault
A long series of German statements, broadcast by official radios, explaining what implied the abandonment of the frontal assault on Stalingrad which had taken untold thousands of German lives, was climaxed early today by the Berlin broadcast of the German Transocean Agency’s routine “military report from the Eastern Front.”
It said:
German tactics of beating down remaining Soviet strongholds in the northern sector of Stalingrad City have experienced a certain change by the employment of heavier and heaviest caliber German artillery in town fighting in that sector of the Eastern Front.
To avoid unnecessary sacrifice of German blood, innumerable new batteries of heavy German artillery are now blowing the last centers of Soviet resistance to pieces before German infantrymen and engineers take possession of them.
‘Main objective reached’
This somewhat slower but systematic procedure is also reflected by official German reports on mopping-up operations in Stalingrad, which prefer not to give any premature announcement of the complete cleaning up of the city unless this has been fully accomplished.
The time when this announcement may finally be made has not the slightest influence on military events since the strategic objective of the German offensive, namely the Volga, was reached weeks ago. That initiative is still firmly in the hands of German military leadership not only in Stalingrad, but also in the remaining sectors of the Eastern Front as reflected by German Army bulletins of recent days and particularly by Thursday’s German Army bulletin.
The German broadcast was recorded in full by the United Press listening post in New York as received direct from Berlin. It went on to describe the situation on the rest of the front where, it was asserted, German forces were attacking.
It said:
All these, however, with the exception of the Southern Front, involve local actions to straighten out lines, eliminate small salients, shorten the front and mop up.
This now also applies to Stalingrad itself, which lies between 30 and 50 kilometers (18.5-30 miles) south of the northern German barrage positions.
Says time isn’t important
Another Berlin broadcast said:
The High Command has full confidence in the ultimate issue of the fighting in Stalingrad. Time is a factor of secondary important. The aim was reached some time ago and is now only a question of cleaning up the town. The High Command is wisely unwilling to incur unnecessary sacrifices and is sparing its men.
The British Press Association suggested that the fact that Russian southern armies had crossed the Don River at several points had been a factor in inducing the usually prodigal German High Command to save its men.
It seemed impossible to separate the Stalingrad situation from the mounting unrest of German-occupied Europe, the German preoccupation with the danger of an Allied invasion in the west, and to the obvious angry mood of the German High Command as shown by its order to fetter British prisoners taken at Dieppe.
Claim Reds shoot prisoners
Berlin opened a new tack last night by broadcasting:
Contrary to international law, the Soviets continue to shoot German war prisoners. This was revealed by documents which German troops on the Eastern Front captured.
Berlin in a broadcast told how foreign correspondents there had been shown a film last night, showing:
…the frightful destruction inflicted on the old historical city of Lubeck by indiscriminate British air attacks.
Pointing out that the film showed no destruction of military targets, Berlin said that this proved no military targets were hit.
The Vichy newspaper, Le Journal, quoted yesterday a dispatch “of German origin” saying that Russia was no longer a serious danger militarily, and that the war in the East was now:
…nothing but a great intermission after which the offensive will turn to the west.
The dispatch said:
This might happen soon as the principal objectives have already been attained in the east.
Two new German anti-invasion searchlights, so powerful that their beams extended the breadth of the Dover Strait and lit up the English shore nearly 25 miles away, were turned on for the first time last night.
Dutch sources reported further restrictions, the third in three days, on civilian activities in the islands off the Dutch coast.
Military experts here felt that Hitler was preparing the German people, in his Stalingrad announcement, for the realization that his entire summer offensive had failed. The one objective was not to take Stalingrad but to crush the Red Army, and this he had not done.
Recall boast at Rostov
Experts also felt that the Germans must continue to attack Stalingrad in hope that sooner or later they would take it or level it. But they said there was no doubt that they had been forced to abandon their total attack because Stalingrad was a meatgrinder for the German Army.
Experts were skeptical of the idea that artillery could level Stalingrad. They recalled that when the Russian counteroffensive last fall started rolling the Germans back, the Nazi High Command announced it was abandoning Rostov-on-Don only so it could level it with artillery because its people aided the Russian Army.
Though in their natural caution, authorities here did not share the optimism of unofficial quarters, it seemed certain that the Germans, balked by Russia’s resistance, were trying to save face.
