DIVE BOMBERS' TACTICS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 54, 9 March 1943, Page 3

DIVE BOMBERS' TACTICS

TROOPS SEE TARGETS STRAFED

REALISTIC DISPLAY

There are 2000 of them sitting comfortably in the sunshine on the side of the escarpment. The day is i perfect and the view magnificent. ] Three hundred feet below begins a tangled vista of river bed,, scrub and tussock, spread across the. miles to the mountains. The 2000 arc soldiers. So, the civilian motorist passing ( on the road below them might say , (if he were allowed, to use the road this morning) "This is how the Army spends its time, just daudling about in the sun." And then, cspj--ing the Army troop carriers tucked aAvav under the lee of the escarpment, "Now I know why I can't get petrol: its one of these Army picnics.'' Certainly it is a quiet and peaceful scene —at the moment. The troops are there as spectators—not of the scenery, however, but of something attuned to the grimness of the times.. Above the hum of conversation and the sigh of the wind in the tussock a throbbing note obtrudes, as out of the south the fighter planes come in over the escarpment, break formation, and dive out of the sun individually with machine guns spitting lead at .the dummy figures and slit trenches half a mile away from our natural grandstand.. The men lolling in the sun on the escarpment are being trained in the art of killing without being killed. They are soldiers of a number of well known New Zealand regiments ■ —the City of Wellington's Own, the Hawse's Bay Regiment, the .Well-ington-East Coast. Coast Mounted Rifles. The fighters roll back over the escarpment to come in again and again to ground strafe the targets. Their place is taken by another squadron of planes, which make a number of low level, live, bomb attacks on dummy buildings behind the slit trenches. As the Air Force officer who describes the moves over a loud speaker explains, this form of attack is used rather for the moral than the material effect. It is demonstrated as part of the day's scheme for teaching the troops to be cover-conscious under air attack. Then come the djve. bombers, flying scdatelj r in formation 2000 feet up in a cloudless sky until the moment, when they peel off and rocket down in line astern to drop those devastating little things known as anti-personnel bombs. They leave no more than a large puddle mark on the spot where they land, but spread death and destruction among those who persist in ignoring the austere attractions of a slit trench during an air raid. These planes make, more than a dozen dives each on to the taigcts, and their bombing looks uncomfortably accurate from our grandstand view considerably above the point where the pilots pull out of their dives and release their bombs. The latter burst on impact with a vicious flash and ripping detonation like the sound of a super-pneumatic tyre bursting. Through the whole display the troops on the escarpment have been kept informed of the tactics involved, from the calling up by radio of the planes from a distant drome by Air Support Control working in liaison with the Army, to* the actual evolutions of the machines roraing overhead. After the demonstiation the troops go down to see tot themselves what lias happened to the man-sized targets placed above each slit trench. In the trenches are sandbags, placed as you would ordinarily use a slit trench, whether soldiers or civilian, there are bullet and, bomb marks on the exposed targets, but. none on any target inside a slit trench!

Just a show. Just 2000 troops loll~i ing in the sun.. Just a bit of •co f » operational between Army and Air Force. Just a group of lighting lit New Zealanders preparing themselves lor battle.