LATE MESSAGES

Greymouth Evening Star, 22 March 1945, Page 6

LATE MESSAGES

WESTERN FRONT.

LONDON, March 21. Armoured units of the Third Army entered the Rhine town of Ludwigshafen. They found that the bridge linking the city with Mannheim had been demolished. .Other tanks advanced seven miles eastward reached the Rhine, one.mile north of the outskirts of Ludwigshafen, and iou miles from those inside the city, say correspondents. Ludwigsnafen which originally was only a suburb of Mannheim, with which it was hnked by.one of the most imposing of the Rhine bridges, had grown ih thp century before the war to a 14u,000 with important industries, Including ieals, iron foundries, sawmills and forces, to-clay, advanced nine miles, cleared 20 and entered four places. Since the beginning of March, they have captured 5230 square miles of the Rhineland and captured 4225 places. On the eastern flank, the Seventh Army made further limited advances to-uay against stubborn resistance. One division encountered the stillest opposition from niultibarrelled mortars, north of Wissembpurg. French armoured units and Algerian infantrymen nearer the Rhine drove several miles against strong opposition through a forest near the eastern end of the Siegfried Line. . . The Germans retreating across the Rhine left a huge stock of undamaged railway equipment including 2500 freight cars of which many are loaded with coke and coal, while another 2000 freight cars and 40 locomotives need only minor repairs. This windfall, is estimated to have saved the Allies millions of man-hours and released thousands of tons of shipping space for other purposes. PEACE OFFERS LONDON, March 21. The “Daily Telegraphs” Paris correspondent reports: “On good authority” the peace feelers of the type recently made at Stockholm have b’een put out in other neutral States notably the Vatican and Eire. When the German Ambassador approached the Pope- His Holiness refused to transmit the proposals to the Allies, but Mr. De Valera communicated them to Washington.