FEAR FELT IN GERMANY

Southland Times, Issue 24144, 5 June 1940, Page 8

FEAR FELT IN GERMANY

Raids By British Over Rhineland MORE SUCCESSES ANNOUNCED (United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright) LONDON, June 3. American Press correspondents in Berlin say that the raids carried out by the Royal Air Force over the Rhineland have caused fear and consternation among the civilian populatior throughout Germany. “In support of the Allied Armies Royal Air Force medium bombers made a series of attacks on enemy gun emplacements, roads, railways and troop concentrations in the Dunkirk area,” according to a communique issued by the Air Ministry. Marshalling yards were bombed and an oil tank and wagons were set alight and troop convoys were machinegunned by low-flying bombers in the course of Sunday night’s extensive raids over north-west Germany. At Soest, an important railway junction east of Dortmund, a line of high ex~ plosive bombs fell across the centre of the crowded railway yard. Moving trains were hit and brought to a standstill and direct hits were registered on loaded goods wagons. In another successful attack on a marshalling yard carried out shortly after midnight a group of oil tank wagons standing in the middle of the yard was first wrecked and then set alight by incendiary bombs. The fire kindled by the bombr spread rapidly. Clouds of smoke were seen rising from the yard some tune after the raid. Road and rail junctions at Osnsbruck were heavily attacked for the second night in succession. A direct hit was scored on a goods yard at Hamburg, and at Hamm, south of Munster, one end of the bridge over the canal was reported to have been demolished and the nearby railway tracks torn up by three heavy bomb explosions. BUILDINGS DESTROYED Enemy air bases at Rotterdam, Devener and Wesel were also visited by night raiders. At the Rotterdam aerodrome at Waalhaven the group of buildings which had survived an earlier Allied bombardment was destroyed by a salvo of heavy calibre bombs. At 1 Wesel, in the aerodrome used by German bomber squadrons, bombs were seen to burst on a large hangar. They resulted in a violent explosion and a fierce outbreak of fire as if from a petrol dump nearby. Other sections of heavy bombers on their way back from successful raids came low over enemy territory to carry out machine-gun attacks against troop concentrations located by parachute flares. A long convoy of armoured vehicles caught on the road near Aachen in the early hours of Monday morning was first heavily bombed with high explosive and incendiary bombs from a height of 2000 feet and then, in the light of a slowly descending parachute flare, it was subjected to machine-gun attack. Salvoes of bombs were seen to burst in the midst of a convoy on the road and between it and the adjoining woods. A series of heavy explosions continued to break out for some time after the attack as ammunition or petrol lorries in the wrecked convoy which were ignited by the incendiary bombs caught fire and blew up.