The Ypsilanti Daily Press

Shelling Sevastopol, Attack on City Expected Within Few Hours
Drive Ninety Miles Across Crimea in Week Port Useless Now as Base For Ships
(By Associated Press)

German field batteries were reported shelling Russia's great Black Sea naval base of Sevastopol today, and Nazi front-line dispatches declared that after driving 90 miles across the Crimea in seven days, Axis troops were ready to storm the city "within a very few hours."

Powerfully fortified, Sevastopol resisted a British French-Turkish siege for 11 months in 1854-55 but advices reaching London concede that the Germans already had immobilized the port as a base for operations of the Soviet Black Sea fleet.

How long it could withstand a siege under the hammering of modern weapons was another question.

Feodosiya Captured

A bulletin from Adolf Hitler's field headquarters said German troops knifing clear across the Crimea had captured the eastern coastal town of Feodosiya, on the southern side of the narrow isthmus leading to the Kerch Strait, perhaps thereby cutting off the eastern avenue of escape to the Caucasus.

German dispatches said the Red armies trapped in the Crimea-variously estimated to number from 250,000 to 500,000-faced almost inevitable annihilation, and that the shattered remnants were fleeing headlong to the sea in the hope of duplicating the British withdrawal from Dunkerque.

However the Nazis made a similar claim when Soviet troops falling back through the Ukraine took a stand at Odessa, where they held out for many weeks before withdrawing.

Nazi reports from the front said German dive bombers already had sunk or damaged 26 Russian transports waiting in the harbors of Sevastopol, Kerch and Yalta.

German aim of the Crimean offensive might be:

A drive into the oil-rich Caucasus.

A long push eastward against Astrakhan the Volga River delta port which is a base for British-United States supplies shipped to Russia from Iran by the Caspian Sea, or

Simple outflanking of the Russian army of Rostov.