BESIEGED TOBRUK

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 119, 22 May 1941, Page 10

BESIEGED TOBRUK

AUSTRALIAN DEFIANCE

LIFE IN THE FORTRESS

ONE COMPLAINT: NO

BEER

(Rec. 1 p.m.)

LONDON, May 21

The worst enemies of the Tobruk defenders, who have been besieged for 39 days, are lack of sleep, fleas, boredom, and dust, says a correspondent of the British United Press who has returned to Cairo from the fortress.

Hardly a single building at Tobruk has not been hit, he says, but work is still going on inside the town. Shipping in the harbour is the favourite target of the dive-bombers, but ships arrive and unload despite difficulty in negotiating the harbour because of the numerous wrecks.

In the last few days attacks by divebombers have not been so frequent, nor have the bombers been so numerous. Food and water are plentiful, but beer is unobtainable. This is the only complaint of the Australians, who receive letters regularly and bathe in the Mediterranean in spite of the divebombing and machine-gunning by the German planes.

The band of the Victorian Regiment practises daily in the open, though the thunder of the guns .frequently drowns .the strains of "Waltzing Matilda," while the programme is frequently interrupted by a hasty dive into trenches as raiders swoop down. The Australians produce two daily news sheets. One, the "Tobruk Truth," boasts* that it always appears, and it supports this claim by coming out after a 15001b bomb had landed on 4 the building in which it is produced — U.P.A.