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Show WAR AT SEA TAKES TOLL OF 11 SHIPS I5Y JOE ALEX MOKKIS War on the seas today took another 1L vessels including a sixth British warship and war on the western front was reported by Nazis to have resulted re-sulted in a set-back for the French near Tirmasens. At the same time, dispatches dis-patches from Berlin said lhat gun-iirc gun-iirc was audible for 15 minutes in the west end of the German c;i pital, but no explanation was forthcoming. French Driven Off The German high command's claim of success on the western front said that French forces had occupied an important hill southwest south-west of I'rimasens but were driven driv-en off by a strong German artillery and infantry attack which took possession of the disputed ground and resulted in capture of many French prisoners after sharp fighting in which allied airplanes participated. On the seas, where the Nazis t hrea tened drastic retaliation against armed allied merchantmen, merchant-men, the toll of ships sunk by mines or U-boat action this week mounted steadily. An unidentified British destroyer destroy-er sank with a loss of about seven men after hitting: a German mine, the admiralty announced at about the same time a British trawler was reported sunk by a U-boat and a British cargo steamer by an explosion off the coast of Scotland. Scot-land. Still other messages disclosed dis-closed the sinking of another British freighter by an explosionand explos-ionand a Norwegian steamer. Heavy Loss The sinking of the destroyer, following another German bombing bomb-ing raid on the Shetland Islands yesterday, followed the officially admitted loss of the Courageous with 573 dead; the Kittiwake with five; the Royal Oak with 810; the submarine Oxley with 53; and an armed trawler with 27 a total of 1,403 dead. Renewal of. activities on the sea on a bigger scale only one British-ship had been lost last week aroused interest again in the possibility that Adolf Hitler's nng-awaited big offensive against England would come by air and sea rather than by a land offensive offens-ive on the western front or through Belgium or Holland. The German press warned that armed allied merchantmen could not be considered as carrying guns merely for defense against U-boats and would be treated as "enemy warships" and pirate vessels ves-sels in the future. The diplomatic front also was . 5 comparatively quiet, with greatest great-est interest centering in Soviet Russia's next move. Two capitals that waited that move with greatest concern were Helsingfors and Bucharest. The Finns were iy the direct path of Soviet anger as a result of having broken off negotiations on Russian Rus-sian demands for naval bases on the Gulf of Finland. In Bucharest, fear was felt that Soviet attention would be concentrated con-centrated in the Balkans as soon as the Finnish dispute was out of the way or indefinitely postponed. |