KEPT UP STEADILY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 June 1943, Page 3

KEPT UP STEADILY

AIR ATTACKS ON ITALIAN PORTS AND THE SICILIAN FERRY ENEMY AIRCRAFT WRECKED ON GROUND. MOSQUITOES RAID RAILWAYS. LONDON, June 21. In the Mediterranean R.A.F. Wellingtons again took up the attack yesterday on the vital train ferry link between Sicily and Italy. Another force of bombers attacked ports on the south and west of Sicily. Marauders attacked three airfields, smashing up aircraft on the ground, workshops, barracks and other targets.

At night Mosquito bombers attacked railway targets in Sicily and Southern Italy. Seventeen Axis planes were destroyed. Five Allied planes were lost. ITALY’S WEAK SPOT. The Allied air offensive in the Mediterranean is finding Italy’s Achilles heel —her transport system —according to eye-witnesses who have just returned from Italy and who are quoted by the “Daily Telegraph’s’’ Stockholm correspondent. Informants point out that the system is being affected directly by train-busting raids such as those which the Malta-based intruders carry out, in conjunction with the bombing attacks on the keypoints Messina, Naples, Reggio, di Calabria and San Giovanni. Indirectly the system is suffering through the action of the Italian workers who, in towns in Sicily and Italy, refuse to stay overnight and leave for the country as soon as their shift is over to join their evacuated wives and children. Efforts by the officials to prevent this mass evacuation, which is swamping the already overburdened State railways, have so far failed The “Daily Mail’s” correspondent on the Italian frontier says that, according to reports from Rome, Mussolini, accompanied by the Fascist Party Secretary, Scorza, and other high Fascist officials, has just been in Sicily. The party visited Palermo, and the Duce inspected troops, beach defences, tank traps and coastal guns, and antiparatroop preparations were demonstarted for him. The main object of the visit, it is believed, was to boost the morale of the defenders which the heavy raids had affected.