SERIOUS POSITION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 September 1941, Page 5

SERIOUS POSITION

ON CENTRAL FRONT ADMITTED IN BERLIN. SOVIET PINCER MOVEMENTS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, August 30. Two separate pincer movements by the Soviet armies on the northern and central fronts threaten to envelop the entire Germany army, which, under General von Leeb, is threatening Leningrad. The Russian offensive in the Smolensk sector on the central front is gaining momentum, while in the north the spearhead of a great Russian coun-ter-attack has pierced the German lines near Pskov, at the southern end of Lake Peipus, and is reported to be rapidly advancing ‘westward and southward. The northern Russian enveloping movement has been launched along a 250-mile front between Lake Peipus and the Valdai Hills. The Stockholm correspondent of “The Times” says that if the counter-offensive is on a scale as optimistic as the Russians believe it is, all the German forces east and northeast of Pskov are really in a desperate position, as they have ventured into a pocket devised after the favourite German pattern. The Moscow “Pravda” today claimed that in the operations in the centre 30,000 Germans had been wiped out in front of Smolensk alone and that the entire artillery of two Nazi divisions was captured intact. For the first time correspondents in Berlin have been permitted to say that the situation on the central front is undeniably serious.