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A busy day in war news. Russian armies, attacking on an 800-mile front, advanced 38 miles across the base of the Polish Corridor to within 150 miles of Berlin. Other Russian troops captured the East Prussian fortress cities of Insterburg and Allen-stein and split the Nazi lines in the southeastern tip of German Silesia. (The Berlin Radio said that Adolf Hitler had gone to the Eastern Front to assume, personal command. Swedish newspaper dispatches reaching the Office of War Information said the Germans were, building defenses outside Berlin.) Unconfirmed reports reaching Stockholm indicated the Germans had started a mass civilian evacuation of Berlin.
The Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet quoted a neutral diplomat arriving in Bern, Switzerland from Berlin as saying he saw long columns of heavily-laden trucks driven by Nazi Storm Troopers leaving the Reichschancellery. This indicated that important archives were being evacuated. The German radio has not admitted an evacuation of the capital. But it said Germans were streaming from offices and workshops to join the battle against the invaders in East Prussia and Silesia. – Nazi propagandists told their people that “the great hour of our most sincere test has come.” Five Russian Army groups, which Berlin estimated at S,500,000 men, captured more than 1,750 towns and settlements on the 11th day of the great winter offensive.
Meanwhile, on the Western front: The Belgian bulge collapsed Monday in a German rout over ice-glazed and snow-drifted roads. Allied warplanes knocked out nearly 3,000 enemy motor vehicles and tanks enough to equip virtually an entire enemy panzer army. In an aerial slaughter without equal in the war, airmen rained punishing blows on the remains of two German panzer armies that had made the Ardennes break-through. At the same time some 1,000 railroad cars were destroyed or damaged in aerial sweeps over Nazi supply lines.
The United States Third Army, racing ahead up to five miles, found the Luxembourg half of the shattered Ardennes salient virtually deserted and resistance disorganized. The enemy stand crumpled before the United States First Army in Belgium. Pilots reported that hardly any of the German columns fleeing from the Ardennes made good their escape. – they reported 65 tanks and armored vehicles, 1,593 trucks and 635 railroad cars destroyed, and 62 tanks and armored vehicles and 1,179 trucks, as well as many more railroad cars, damaged. Hundreds of German troops were slain.
And that’s just a little of what happened, this January 23, 1945 as reported by NBC’s News Of The World.
