ENEMY ROUTED

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 212, 8 September 1941, Page 7

ENEMY ROUTED

RUMANIAN FORCES

Odessa Hitting Strongly As Siege Continues UP.A. and British Wireless. Rec. 1 p.m. LONDON, Sept. 7. Reports regarding Odessa state that Russian marines have killed 700 and captured 200 Germans. Ten artillery batteries have been put out of action. Two Rumanian infantry battalions have been routed by the marines.

Persistent bayonet charges by the Russian forces are throwing back the Germans and Rumanians attacking Odessa. Hundreds of men and women are risking death to gather wrecked'enemy war material as scrap for the arms factories in the city. Russian sources state that German and Russian wounded around Odessa are so numerous that the enemy cannot take them to the rear. Thousands are lying along the roads waiting for ambulances and many are dying for want of attention.

In Odessa itself transport, markets and cinemas are operating normally. Three daily papers are coming out as usual. There is plenty of food still in reserve, although meat is short through the removal of cattle from the battle area. The nearest fighting is 10 miles away.

The Germans in the Leningrad area are engaged in a battle with enormous Russian forces against which they are obliged to send constant reinforcements in order to maintain their positions, says Reuter's correspondent in Moscow. There is a strong impression in Moscow that events are taking a more favourable turn. The defence of Leningrad, like that of Kiev and Odessa, has been organised with immense thoroughness. The Germans claimed yesterday that longrange guns are now shelling positions inside Leningrad, but there is no confirmation of this in Moscow. (Finnish reports state that fires in Leningrad can be seen from the frontier. The full weight of the German air force is being thrown into the attacks on Leningrad, but the Russians say that all attempts to bomb the city have failed so far.

The Germans claim to have captured a railway station to the north of Leningrad on the old' Finnish frontier, and to have pierced the southern defences of the city in one point at least.

Marshal Timoshenko's successes in the Smolensk-Gomel area are immediately threatening to amputate the slender finger with which von Bock is aiming to encircle Kiev. The Russians have either regained Smolensk or completely marooned the Germans who entered the city six weeks ago. Berlin for the first time admits that the German forces in the central sector are everywhere on the defensive. That the German army has become debilitated by the ferocity of the Russian resistance is openly admitted by the Wilhelmstrasse, and the subject of the fall of Moscow is never mentioned now.

A special correspondent of the New York Times who was permitted to enter Wiipuri with the Finnish forces, says. "Of the city of 120.000 people nothing whatever remains. It was blasted to ruin by the Russians before they withdrew. They left one-man foxholes where Red volunteers made last stands. They could not be ferreted out by ordinary means and had to be blasted out, with their machine-guns, by heavy artillery."