The Waterbury Democrat., 1944-01-31
The War On
 MonyFronts

The Allies celebrated the 11th an- niversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power by hurling back his armies in Italy and Russia and by smashing his tottering capital with two more aerial assaults.
 Allied forces drove ahead in Italy both from their beachhead below Rome and on the main front to the south, where tank-led American in- fantrymen threatened to outf1ank the entire enemy line in some of the bloodiest fighting of the Ital- ian campaign.
 Advancing through maze of barbed wire and bristling enemy pillboxes, the American assault troops deepened their bridgeheads across the Rapido river and stormed two hill positions overlooking the German anchor town of Casino.
 Their advance carried them with in three mles of the enemy noun tain bastion to the northwest and within two miles directly north as the German defenders battled des- perately to save their crunbling Gustav line.
 On the invasion front below Rome, Anglo-American troops were reported running into increasingly heavy German counter attacks amid indications the Germans were digging in for a determined stand along the highways and railroad lines south and southwest of Cis- ternia on the Appian Way about 25 miles from the capital. Unted Press Correspondent Rey- holds Packard reported, however, that the Germans might have be- gun withdrawal from Rome. Ref ugeCs fleeing the capital said the Nazis are evacuating virtually all their troops after mining all stra- tegic points within the city. Race To KingiSepp
 In Russia, Red Army spearheads raced toward Kingisepp. last Ger man toehold east of Estonia in a drive to trap thousands of demoral- ized enemy troops retreating toward bottleneck formed by the Gulf of Finland and Lake Peipus, now only 12 miles distant.
 Capture of Narva, Estonian stronghold which controls the 27- mile-wide escape gap, would force the Germans to flee 100 miles south to the strategic rail junction of Pskov and on the south shore of Lake Peipus, already the only exit point for almost 250,000 enemy troops caught in the shrinking bulge south of Leningrad.
 The threat to the forces pocketed in that bulge was intensified yester- day as General Kyril A. Meretskov's Novgorod Vanguards over-ran Veli- koye Selo in a sweep to within 15 miles east of Leningrad Pxkov rail- road, last line out of the ill-fated enemy salient.
 On the approaches to Latvia. the Russians captured several German defense points west and southwest of newly-captured Novosolnki, 260 ciles south of Leningrad and 70 miles from the Latvian border.
 RAF SmasheS Berlin
 The RAT, meanwhile, smashed Berlin with twin raids the first ever made on a German city in a single night that were believed to have brought the Allied bombers within sight of their goal of knock ing the Nazi capital as the nerve center of the war effort.
 Waves of four-engined bombers hurled some 1900 tons of explosives and incendiaries into the dying city shortly after dusk in the nights main assault and several hours later twin-engined Mosquitoes hammered the blazing ruins in strong follow through attack.
 The double assault carried tht most intensive aerial offensive o. the war past its 18th hour ane brought the total tonnage of bomb! dropped to 5000 - more than tha' dropped by the Luftwaffe during the entire 1941 blitz against London
 The RAF lost 33 bombers in tht Berlin raids and in secondary at. tacks on central and western Ger. many.