AGAINST NAZI MECHANISED THRUST

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 April 1941, Page 6

AGAINST NAZI MECHANISED THRUST

Made by Yugoslavs in Struma Valley DEARTH OF ANTI-TANK GUNS VITAL LINES TOO THINLY HELD (By Telegraph—Press Association.—Copyright.) (Received This Day, 12.55 p.m.). LONDON, April 14. Reports, describing how the Germans invaded Yugoslavia, show that they lost 42 tanks from the blitz columns. Yugoslavia had no organised defence line for more than fifty miles from the point where the frontiers of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece meet in the Strumnitza Valley. Moreover, this sector was manned by only a single division, the rapidity of the German moves having forestalled the concentration of trcops. Nevertheless, the Serbians sacrificed their lives without stint in an effort to hold up 170 tanks rolling along the valley. Two Serbian battalions stood their ground with only four anti-tank guns. The Germans lost twenty tanks in the first attack and twenty-four in the second, but by then nine had got through the Serbian lines, clearing the way for the remainder, which reached the Vardar Valley and from thence Salonika. Meantime, further along the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border, German columns advanced at three points. Some 200 tanks forced the thinly held Yugoslav lines to Stip and Voles, while still further north, from Kyuatendil, about 300 tanks moved on Kumanova and thence to Skolpje, where parachutists had made the first attach, 1 aimed at paralysing the Yugoslav communications.