Busy day of war on all fronts for the last day of February.
British armored forces late today stemmed a new Axis five pronged assault in northern Tunisia, coincident with American recapture of the railroad highway town of Kasserine to the southwest. (A Tunisia dispatch to the London Sunday Express said the Americans had recaptured three airdromes between Sbeitla and Thelepte, east and south of Kasserine.) The main fighting shifted dramatically to the north from central Tunisia, where Marshal Erwin Rommel’s air harried columns were fleeing into Faid Pass after losing an estimated eighty or more tanks in their frustrated attempt to crack the Allied front and counter-invade Algeria.
Mobile American armored units, having severed an important enemy communications link at Kasserine, thrust beyond that town toward Sbeitla on the east and the Thelepte airdrome on the road to Feriana to the south. Axis troops were reported already to have evacuated Sbeitla, Thelepte and Feriana in a hasty withdrawal to their starting point at Faid Pass, apparently abandoning all their territorial gains of the past twelve days.
Meanwhile – Soviet forces, battling against fresh German reserves, were engaged in grinding down an intense Nazi counterattack through the Donets basin area in fighting so furious that even small hamlets changed hands several times. Front line dispatches told of terrific battles as the Red Army slowly neared the line along which the Germans apparently will seek to stem the mighty Russian offensive. A BBC broadcast heard in New York by CBS quoted the Nazi radio as saying Russian tanks had broken into the main German line south of Lake Ladoga on the Leningrad front. By hurling reserves into their front lines, Nazi commanders organized a counteraction in the region known as “the left bank of the Ukraine,” a spacious area to the left of the Dnieper’s flow. Remnants of divisions which saved themselves from the eastern pincers trap were regrouped and now terrific battles are being fought for all inhabited places on the roads to the Dnieper.
And finally – American Fortress and Liberator bombers smashed the German naval base at Brest on the French coast today while RAF Venturas attacked Dunkerque in continuation of the greatest sustained air assault of the war on enemy installations from the North Sea to the Bay of Biscay All the big U S bombers returned safely from the latest in the series of assaults in which Allied planes have pounded the Nazi war machine twice around the clock and more The daylight operations followed closely a “very heavy” attack by RA bombers last night on the battered German industrial city of Cologne. Munda, the most heavily bombed enemy base in the Solomons has been subjected to the 77th attack in three months by American planes the navy announced today The almost daily pounding’ of Munda and its satellite base on nearby Kolombangara island has led some observers here to believe that the Americans are preparing for new advances in the Solomons In the latest raid Friday (island time) — Douglas dauntless dive bombers accompanied by Grumman Wildcat fighters flew the 180 miles from Guadalcanal’s Henderson field to smash again at the enemy’s central Solomons air base. They started many fires and destroyed at least one plane on the ground bringing Japanese aircraft losses in the Solomons to 875.
And along with breaking news from Tunisia, that’s a sample of what happened, this February 28, 1943 as reported by CBS Radio’s World News Today.
