NEW WILDERNESS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 March 1943, Page 3

NEW WILDERNESS

CREATED BY GERMANS IN RETREAT ON SMOLENSK. / VILLAGES & FARMS LAID WASTE. LONDON, March 16. At night huge fires light up the sky over the Smolensk front as the retreating Germans burn down the villages and towns in their path. What is not burnt is blown up, and when the Red Army enters the sites it finds them mainly deserted, the villagers having been driven off for forced labour. Paul Winterton recently visited some of the recaptured country, and in a dispatch to the 8.8. C. he says: “Hundreds of villages are now just geographical expressions. . I have walked over the sites of some villages without even knowing that they existed.” The reconstruction of western Russia, he says, will be one of the most difficult and enormous of all tasks after the war. Millions of acres of agricultural land is now given over to weeds. All live stock and all agricultural machinery has been taken away or destroyed. He adds: “When the war ends all of western Russia will be just an untidy building site. There will be . a great shortage of labour, and an even greater shortage of material. “The Germans have made a wilderness and called it a new order.”