Current Events april 9, 1944'

THIS WAS REPORTED TODAY APRIL 9, 1944:

 SEE BELOW FOR AN EDITORIAL PUBLISHED IN THE ABELINE REPORTER-NEWS

Allies Attempted Too Much With Too Little at

Cassino Says War Correpondents' Joint Report

By REYNOLDS PACKARD

United Press War Correspondent;   James E. Roper, Cassino Front;   ROBERT VERMLLION, Anzio Beachhead—;    CLINTON* B. CONGER, 8^th Army front —

Sunday, April 9—(AP)—

The Japanese fortress of Truk in the Carolines was set afire Thursday under the heaviest night raid yet launched from the South Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur announced today. Fifty one tons of explosives blanketed the Dublon island base in the Truk group, setting off great fires and columns of smoke.

 —Two powerful Red armies sweeping ahead on a 230-mile front have hurled Axis troops back across the Hungarian-held Czechslovak border in the Carpathian mountains, stabbed 40 miles inside Rumania, and captured more than 480 villages in a swift chase of a broken enemy, Moscow announced last night.

MIAMI, OKLA, SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 1944

Fires Raging at Truk After

Heaviest South Pacific Raid

13 Enemy Planes Bagged

By Allied Bombing Units

ALLIED HEADQUARTERS SOUTHWEST PACIFIC,

Sunday, April 9—(AP)—

The Japanese fortress of Truk in the Carolines was set afire Thursday under the heaviest night raid yet launched from the South Pacific, Gen. Douglas MacArthur announced today. Fifty one tons of explosives blanketed the Dublon island base in the Truk group, setting off great fires and columns of smoke.

Thirteen enemy planes were also destroyed at Truk in a raid Sunday, bringing to 38 the total of enemy aircraft smashed there by South Pacific raiders. Strafing planes meantime smashed five parked planes on an airdrome at Wewak in New Guinea, at Rabaul and in the Kai islands.

RUSSIAN FORCES

DRIVE 40 MILES

INSIDE RUMANIA

Over 460 Villages Seized As

Nazis Are Handed Stinging Defeat

By TOM YARBDOUGH

LONDON, Sunday, April 9—(.AP)

—Two powerful Red armies sweeping ahead on a 230-mile front have hurled Axis troops back across the Hungarian-held Czechslovak border in the Carpathian mountains, stabbed 40 miles inside Rumania, and captured more than 480 villages in a swift chase of a broken enemy, Moscow announced last night.

A third Russian army, surging around all land sides of Odessa, captured 30 more localities, including Gildendorf, only eight miles northeast of the Black sea port, and completed the liquidation of the remnants of five or six German divisions trapped near Razdelnaya, 40 miles northwest

of Odessa, by wiping out 7,000 enemy troops and capturing 3,200, said the Soviet daily communique, recorded by t h e Soviet monitor from a Moscow broadcast.

 

Allies Attempted Too Much With Too Little at

Cassino Says War Correpondents' Joint Report

EDITOR'S NOTE: Four United Press war reporters collaborated to present the following dispatch on the Italian campaign, a military enigma which after seven months still leaves the public asking such questions as: What were 'the Allied objectives? Why do they advance so slowly? Why was, the British 8th Army stopped at Ortona? Why was General Clark's 5th Army halted at Cassino?

What went wrong at the Anzio beachhead and what are Allies trying to do there now?

Reynolds -Packard, who has covered the Italian campaign from the beginning, has consulted from Naples with his men  in. the field — James. E. Roper on the Cassino front, Robert; Vermijlion at the Anzio beachhead and Clinton B. Conger, presently with the 15th, U. S.

Air Force and formerly attached to. the 8th Army's Adriatic front. This is their joint report.

By REYNOLDS PACKARD

United Press War Correspondent

ALLIED HEADQUARTERS;

Naples,. April 8.— (UP)—

This is a frank description of the Allied Campaign in 'Italy by correspondents who "have been in the field with the troops. It is not a cheery, optimistic ^report because that isn't the kind, of a war American, British, Canadian, African, Indian, French .and Italian troops have" been waging against the Germans in this theater.

The war in Italy is a matter of slogging ahead in some places a few hundred yards in a week and in others of just digging in and trying to hold firm at a stiff cost of lives and limbs, It is ,a war of mud and booby traps, of hopes and disappointments. It is war at its most' undramatic and unpleasant.

The men at the front want the people back home to know that. I have been at the main 5th Army front and more recently at the Anzio beachhead and at both places I was impressed

by the Doughboy's wish that the home folks know that their task in Italy is "tough going." Some of them actually "dared"' me to write how rough the going was in the mountains around Cassino and on the flat beachhead where soldiers feel "like cockroaches in a bathtub" when the Germans shoot down at them from the surrounding heights.

Seven months of struggling up the Italian boot through mud and mountains and across bloody beaches leave the Allie today still short of Rome, the glittering Christmas objective of the armchair strategists at 'home but with these considerable advantages won:

 1. The Mediterranean cleared for Allied shipping to the Middle East; -

 2. Italy knocked out of the war except for a Fascist remnant scarcely holding propaganda value to its Nazi masters;

 3. The great network of air fields ,at" Foggia nesting Allied planes that fly daily to pound German targets in Southern Europe and the Balkans—now hammering enemy communications centers- just ahead of the onrushing Red Army,

These are substantial achievements but the "limited nature of Allied investment of forces has sometimes resulted in spectacular disappointments such as at Cassino and Anzio, Correspondents

at those fronts believe that Allied leaders have .learned many lessons which will be applied

to the forthcoming battle in western Europe.

Here are the front-by-front reports of the correspondents:

James E. Roper, Cassino Front

—The Allies latest attempt to overrun Cassino was an example of trying to do too much with too little. They over-estimated the ability of Allied bombers to desstroy the dug-in German garrison and underestimated the amount of infantry needed to take the town

after the bombardment. Cassino offers lessons that every Allied general will study before the opening of the western front, along which the' Germans " probably will be dug in even deeper than- they were at Cassino  and will resist even more methodically.

The failure to use more infantry seems to have been due primarily to miscalculation, although

Allied generals have not had unlimited resources at their disposal. They have been far short of the 3 to 1 superiority an attacking force- is supposed to have in four major assaults—the -.Americans' bloody failure to cross the Rapido river, three miles south of Cassino, in mid-January; the Americans' first thrust into Cassino with 38 men and two tanks in early February; the New Zealanders' attempt to capture the Cassino railroad station Feb. 18 with two companies

and the latest New Zealand and Indian assaults on Cassino.

On Feb. 8 the Allies came close to capturing the Monte Cassino monastery, which would have cut off the Germans and provided a dominating height to fight from. I watched that attack from a dugout 400 yards from the Abbey and saw Allied troops get within' 75 yards of the walls. If a fresh regiment of- infantry had been thrown into the fight that night I believethe mountain would have been taken.

The failure to provide more infantry for the latest attacks on the town itself ,was partly the result of the high command's belief the terrific bombbardment- would leave the Germans in Cassino dead or "bomb happy." This was a. tragic mistake

Part .of the failure must be attributed to inaccurate bombing. I watched the bombing: for

three and one half hours from Cervaro, two miles from Cassino. and saw sticks of bombs sown across the valley and town and up the nearby mountains. Perhaps 45 percent hit the city, a mile long and twothirds of a mile wide. One stick of bombs fell two miles from Cassino and another dropped from a Liberator a mile behind my vantage point, which I shared part of the time with Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clark. Pilots blamed these wild misses on defective bomb racks. Cassino was turned into a cauldron of fire, smoke and rubble but the Germans came up out of tunnels to resist the infantry- Allied intelligence apparently had not considered the possibility of the Germans

utilizing the ancient tunnels under Cassino, although the Todt labor groups were known to have been working in Cassino as far back as January. Some officers now feel they should have guessed the tunnels were being incorporated in Cassino's defensive network.

The one thing the bombing has -done is to make the streets impassable for armor. With the

armor stuck, Cassino remains a job for infantry and that's what the Allies haven't had enough

of.

ROBERT VERMLLION, Anzio

Beachhead—

The beachhead south of Rome has been quiet for the past 30 days and everywhere in the 90 square miles of American and British-held soil there is an awareness that the curving front is likely to expand in the direction of Rome. Neither side holds the initiative at the moment but the balance is so delicate either may seize it with brief preparation.

Both sides have powerful artillery concentrations and armored forces ready to spearhead

an attack. This situation has prevailed since the last German attack in March between Carroceto

and Cistmia. which was beaten off with heavy losses to the Germans in men and armor and

not without considerable American casualties. Both sides have repaired the damage and now each waits for the other's next move.

Both sides have reached the highest p o i n t of defensive strength. The Germans are laying minefields, stringing barbed wire and erecting strong points all around the Allied perimeter.

The Allies also lie behind wire and mines.

The beachhead commander is confident the Anglo-Americans can withstand another attack as great as the Germans launched in mid-February. American soldiers in the beachhead, fighting for the first time in flat land where movements by day are suicide and by the bright Italian moon

are almost equally dangerous, and becoming increasingly "attack- minded." They are tired of lying all day in "slit trenches or crouching in foxholes exchanging a few shots. with the enemy, or engaging him in inconclusive "combat patrol" action. Many of the Allied soldiers express a desire to attack, take the losses "at one crack" and "get somewhere."

CLINTON* B. CONGER,

8^th Army front —

Since Montgomery's Sangro offensive last November expired two miles above Ortona with a counter-attack by German paratroopers, the rain has kept the 8th Army almost static in its Adriatic coastal positions.

The only offensive action was the New Zealanders gallant but unsuccessful charge against Or-

Sogna in December. The right flank of the 8th faces almost insurmountable obstacles in 'a series of river crossings between its present line and Pescara. To the southwest the Germans are' anchored to the snow-covered Maielli mountains, ranging from six to ten thousand feet high.

Frequent rains are melting the snows but mud and mire still rule this battlefront.