LAID DESOLATE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 June 1943, Page 4

LAID DESOLATE

WAR INDUSTRIAL AREAS OF RUHR ACCOUNT BY EYEWITNESS. RESULT OF R.A.F. BOMBING. (Bv Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 11.45 a.m.) LONDON, June 6. An eyewitness account of the bomb-stricken areas in Germany appears in the Stockholm newspaper “Allehanda,” which does not publish its informant’s name, but vouches for his reliability. “Thick smoke, far different, from the smoke of busy factories, now hangs over the great band of death and destruction which runs across Germany from Cologne to the Hanover district,” he says. “It is smoke from fires, thick and often yellow, which is sometimes almost suffocating owing to phosphorus from British incendiaries. The blast furnaces of Germany's great steel-pro-ducing region at night no longer look the same. Many of them are closed down and also many mines, where huge dumps of coal and coke have been burning for weeks. The R.A.F. raids have put out of action sprinkler systems in additional mines where production is impossible without sprinklers. Water rose to a depth of three feet in Dortmund’s suburbs after the R.A.F. raided the Mohne and Eder dams. Flat-bottomed boats carried on essential traffic. Tremendous explosions put out of action blast furnaces when the water reached the molten metal in them. At least two railway tunnels caved in between Dortmund and Hagen. Great stretches of railway also are flooded.”