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Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 May 1943, Page 4

ALMOST ENDED

SPRING LULL IN RUSSIA INTENSIFIED AIR ACTIVITY ON BOTH SIDES. SURE SIGN OF IMPENDNG ACTION. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) (Received This Day, 12.40 p.m.) LONDON. May 12. Comparative silence continues to cloak the Russian front activities, but the Berlin radio, indicating the scale of intensity of the recent Kuban fighting, claimed that the Russians in the past twelve days had lost nearly 30,000 dead and wounded and also 200 tanks destroyed or seriously damaged. Both sides seem to have confined their major activities in the past twelve hours to hammering each other's communications and supply bases from the air.

The British United Press Moscow correspondent says there are signs from Leningrad to Rostov that the spring lull has almost ended and that fighting is on the way. More intensified air activity on each side is taken as a sure sign of impending action. The Germans, on land, have already thrust against Leningrad, but Russian artillerymen halted and drove back the attackers. The Russians also smashed a German thrust in the Lisichansk sector (in the Donctz) but both these actions were on a small scale compared with the Kuban conflict, in which the Russians continue to pound the German positions before Novorossisk. Reuters Moscow correspondent reports that the Russians have begun to infiltrate through holes punched in the German defence system at Novorossisk, but have not yet seriously breached the defences.