"BOOBY" BOMBS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 230, 25 October 1940, Page 7

"BOOBY" BOMBS

TRAPS FOR NEW ZEALANDERS DODGES IN THE DESERT "Some, weeks ago we parted company with our base camp and since have been embarked on a kind of a grand tour on the Western Desert. In the first fortnight we made four shifts, but now we seem to be settled in comfortably and more or less permanently," writes a soldier from Egypt under date of September 21. "In the season of the full moon our nest is a little disturbed by Italian bombers. But the desert is a big place and most of their eggs are laid well wide of the mark. « . Occasionally they drop 'booby bombs' of a type that go off when you pick 'em up—and off you go with 'em! Thermos flasks and fountain pen designs seemed to the boys to be fair catches. But now we hear that they are disguising their surprise packages as tins of beefl And that does not seem, in such a dry climate, to be quite playing the game! "For myself, I like the desert probable reason being that it entails an inevitable water shortage, so that one has to cut down on one s personal ablutions. How the Colonel's regards it I can't say l though, at odd times and in odd places, it has been suspected of jaundicing his outlook. "Fve riot had an opportunity for establishing the romantic qualities of the desert —alas! So far away from the benefits of civilisation, we have to be content with what we read and with pictures in magazines! We hear a little, too, from guys who'Ve made more recent visits to the great metropolises. "Around these parts I've found the perfect bathing beach—the whitest sand, the greenest stretch of sea trailing off into the blue, and a good surf as well. And bathing is in the 'altogether'! And there are fish, too. In fact, it lacks only pipis and companionship to match the best New Zealand beach."