NOTES ON THE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 54, 1 September 1943, Page 5

NOTES ON THE WAR

TO SMOLENSK

LATEST RUSSIAN DRIVE

Smolensk is the greatest and most formidable of all the German "hedgehogs" in Russia, and the central keypoint of the whole German front. The Red Army's capture of Yelnya and Dorogobuzh marks an. important step on the road to Smolensk. ■ " Telnya is on a railway running east-south-east from Smolensk through Spas Demansk (recently captured by the Russians), crossing the MoscowKiev main line at Sukhimchi, between Kaluga and Bryansk, and the Moscow-Orel-Kharkov-Crimea line at Garbachevo; places at different times in the news. Dorogobuzh is about lo miles north of Yelnya on the Sozh River, an Important tributary of the Dnieper, and half-way between Vyazma and Smolensk. Both the places now recaptured by the Red Army "have been the scenes of fierce fighting in several of the Russian campaigns in this war. When the Germans in their first drive in 1941 towards Moscow had penetrated towards Vyazma by September, Timoshenko counter-attacked on their flank and defeated them at Yelnya. Success was short-lived. The Germans, with greatly superior numbers, struck from the southf as well as from the north and forced Timoshenko to retire to avoid encirclement. It was this final drive, in October, 1941, that brought the Germans almost to the gates of Moscow. The tide-has since ebbed before Rus"sia's two winter offensives, but the rock of Smolensk has proved up to the present an insurmountable obstacle. There was heavy fighting at the end of the* winter round Durovo and Yartsevo on the • Smolensk-Mos-cow main line, but the Russians did not succeed in breaking through. The front line in this central sector runs from Velikie Luki south-east through Nikitinka, Dorogobuzh, Yelnya, between Spas Demansk and Koslavl, round the north and east of Bryansk to Sievsk. Here and southward the Red Army is fanning out over the more cram country with more rapid advances in the far south from TaganrogVital War Material. When the Japanese in their southward sweep in 1942 took Malaya, Burma, the Philippines, and the tast Indies, they cut off the Allies from the principal sources of supply of vital war materials—tin, rubber, Manila hemp, quinine, and kapok. Since then the Allies have had to scour the world for other sources of supply. Bolivia, in South* America, has now become the chief source of tin, though many other fields are being pressed \to produce more, and new fields are being sought. One of the most curious results of the war, however, has been to direct the attention of the Allies in need of the other vital materials mentioned to the original sources from which they sprang. The seeds of the rubber plant which was to occupy millions of acres in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies came originally from the forests of the Amazon in South Amferica. This "wild" rubber was collected from the jungle by natives, often driven hard by their taskmasters, and marketed at Mapaos, half-way up the Amazon, where it was loaded on ships for Europe and North America. Manaos became a boom city, with a magnificent Opera House, still a wonder of Brazil. Then the Malayan plantations came in with a rush and _ the world's rubber centre shifted to Singapore; the grass grew in the streets of Manaos and the Opera House was closed. The search for wild rubber for the Allied war machine has put new life into Amazonia and restored Manaos to something like its old prosperity. It is also fairly well known that quinine, the only specific still for malaria, was fouhd in the bark or the cinchona tree, a denizen of the Andes regions. But Java, with the cultivated cinchona, became the chief source, and the Andean trade languished. This again has taken a new lease of life. Kapok has for years been a virtual monopoly of Java, but kapok, too, finds its native habitat in tropical America, where once more it is being collected and marketed. In this region also there is a war boom in balsa wood, the lightest of all timbers, which is now used in the construction of the famous Mosquito aeroplane. The list could be extended greatly, to a variety of nuts and other vegetable products now largely under . control of Japan, but two items deserve special mention —superphosphates recovered for the