FEW CHANGES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 September 1941, Page 5

FEW CHANGES

REPORTED ON EASTERN FRONT AS RESULT OF RECENT HEAVY FIGHTING. FINNISH DEMANDS FOR PEACE. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, September 2. The Russians and Germans continue locked in heavy fighting, and the only change reported on the entire Eastern Front is a German and Finnish claim of an advance on the Karelian Isthmus, with the capture of a town 50 miles north-east of Leningrad, and another town at the eastern end of the old Mannerheim Line. The foreign editor of the ‘'Daily Express” says that Field-Marshal Mannerheim has bowed before the Finnish storm against a German alliance and is now willing to order a cessation of fighting immediately the Finns reach their old frontiers. The whole of the Finnish Government thus supports tho people’s demand for peace. The Germans admit that they have been forced on the defensive in the Smolensk sector along a fairly wide front. A German officer, a message states, said that .the Russian artillery fire was something warfare had never seen before. The position of the Germans in the wedge they recently drove east of Gomel appears to be precarious. It is a very narrow salient, and the Russians are attacking at the northern side of its base. To the south of the wedge lie the Pripet marshes. The Berlin radio reports a statement by a German officer that Russian troops landed on the west bank of the Dnieper River from gunboats so cleverly camouflaged with tree branches that they were not identified till the troops had landed. Russians are also reported to have landed on the Black Sea coast west of the Dnieper. It was officially announced in Moscow that Russian bombers on the night of August 31 dropped incendiary and explosive bombs on military and industrial targets in a Berlin district and in Koenigsberg, Memel, and Danzig. The Moscow correspondent of the “Daily Express” says that considerable Allied air reinforcements have already reached Russia. Other sources say there are strong indications that British and Russian air raids on Berlin are about to occur on a large scale. The quality and types'of the planes to be used are still military secrets. HAVOC BEHIND LINES DEVASTATION SURVEYED FROM PLANE. LONDON, September 2. The Berlin correspondent of a Swiss newspaper, who flew over the German lines in the central sector, says that the havoc behind the lines was immense. For 200 miles he saw villages burning and wasted farms everywhere. In Smolensk the cathedral stood undamaged among the ruined buildings.