PRESSURE MAINTAINED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 September 1942, Page 3

PRESSURE MAINTAINED

ON TERRIFIC SCALE BUT LITTLE ENEMY PROGRESS IN STALINGRAD AREA. BOTH SIDES THROWING IN REINFORCEMENTS. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 9.45 a.m.) , RUGBY, September 15. No material progress during the past 24’ ..hours appears to have been made by the Germans on any sector of the Stalingrad front. Pressure is being maintained on the same terrific scale, however, and more and more, reinforcements are being thrown in by both sides. South-west of Stalingrad fighting is taking place in three sectors. In the central sector three night attacks were repelled with heavy losses, but yesterday morning overwhelming numbers of enemy planes bombed the Soviet lines section by section, seeking to reduce to dust everything and everyone, so as to enable a, charge through. Soviet anti-aircraft guns and fighters, however, succeeded in somewhat reducing the effectiveness of daylight raids, so that when the ground forces attacked, Russian artillerymen and anti-tank riflemen were able to resist. For an advance of just over a quarter of a mile the Germans lost dozens of tanks and several infantry units. Fierce fighting is raging on the other two sectors. To the south, on one sector fighting for one settlement raged throughout the day. Germans who had penetrated in small groups were cleaned up, but the Germans later were able to recapture and consolidate positions in the western part of the town. The battle continues. In the Mosdok area, the Germans have already attacked the new positions to which the Russians were compelled to withdraw after more enemy tanks had been put across the Terek River. The Germans, however, are reported to have been checked and to have sustained heavy losses. Russian tanks are seeking to annihilate a group of German tanks which succeeded in penetrating one locality. On one sector of the central front, the enemy was dislodged from one locality.

ON CREDIT SIDE

WAR BRINGS NEW LIFE TO ASIATIC RUSSIA. CULTURAL AND INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT. NEW YORK, September 15. The commentator in Moscow of the National Broadcasting Company says that the war in some ways has proved a blessing in disguise. The evacuated populations, with factories, scientific institutions, theatres and museums, have converted scores of cities in Siberia and Central Asia into important cultural centres and brought life to thousands of acres of virgin soil. The latest development in Central Asia is the opening of a 30-mile-long irrigation channel in the Uzbekistan and Tajikistan Republics, which has been built by 50,000 collective farmers and will increase the arable land by nearly 100,000 acres. Central Asia’s chief pre-war contribution to the national economy of the Soviet Union was cotton, but now it is doing a great deal to make up the production of grain and sugar beet that was lost in the Ukraine.

COMING WINTER

GERMANS WELL PREPARED. ACCORDING TO SOVIET JOURNALIST. SYDNEY, September 15. M. Vladimir Mikhaiv, a Soviet journalist, who has arrived in Australia to establish a branch of Tass, the official Russian news agency, said in an interview today that the coming weather would not aid the Red Army any more than the Axas invaders. “Some people are basing their hopes on the winter as a kind of third front,” he said, “but the Germans last spring began preparations

for this coming winter. They mobilised all factories to produce warmer clothing and the appropriate food stuffs, and they took all the warm clothing they could beg, buy and steal from all the occupied countries. “Russia and the other United Nations will have to rely on themselves, not on the winter, which is due in Moscow about the middle of November and later at Stalingrad.” M. Mikhaiv, who is accompanied by his wife, is aged 35.