INTENSE STRUGGLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 September 1941, Page 5

INTENSE STRUGGLE

NAZI THRUST AGAINST KHARKOV PREPARATIONS IN SOUTH & ELSEWHERE. RUSSIANS HITTING BACK HARD AT LENINGRAD. (Bv Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, September 29. The Stockholm correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph” says the Germans have begun a thrust against Kharkov. German panzer forces are locked in battle with Marshal Budenny's armies east of Poltava along the railway to Kharkov. A Moscow report says that the Russians are confident that they will be. able to withstand the “blitz” against the Crimea no matter what may be its scale. Meanwhile nothing is being left to chance, and at the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk, south-west of the Sea of Azov, and at Batum, on the Caucasus coast, large naval bases are being created. In the central sector Marshal Timoshenko’s armies are continuing their counter-attacks on a widening front. The Russians are constantly counterattacking in the Leningrad zone, and the battle for Leningrad appears to have developed into one of continuous movement with raids and counterraids. An Ankara message says the Germans have massed gigantic forces opposite the Crimean isthmus. Rumanian labour battalions from the Odessa front are now enlarging aerodromes and building,new ones on this front. The German troops who were resting in Rumania have again gone to the front. Fifty large troop-carrying barges have moved down the Danube past Galati, and four E-boats which were built at Galati have also moved down the Danube. An unconfirmed report says that troop-carrying barges and torpedo-boats which have been at Burgas and Varna have departed northward, hugging the coast and anchoring by day to avoid detection. The‘Germans are concentrating considerable air strength against Leningrad, and the Moscow “Pravda” refers to “Richthofen squadrons” which put 80 planes into the air at one time and make over a score of raids in a day.