BAYONET FIGHTER

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 3278, 21 June 1943, Page 6

BAYONET FIGHTER

LIKE TO GET AT JAPS AUSTRALIAN D.C.M. WORK WITH 9TH. DIVISION Corporal Horton Ford McLachlan, D.C.M., aged 2G. of Boggabilla, New South Wales, one of the Ninth Division’s best bayonet fighters, returned to Australia by a hospital ship and is anxious to get at some Japs. “Bayonet lighting is my specialty, and they tell me the Japs will come out and have a ’spar with you.” he said. They may be small and slippery, but I'll have a go at them. “From what I’ve seen at Tobruk and Alamein, bayonet fighting is second nature to big bushwhackers like me.” McLachlan won his D.C.M. for killing four Germans with his bayonet, six with a tommy-gun, and four more with hand grenades, in 20 minutes at Tel el Eisa, on the Alamein front on September 1 last year. He attacked a German machine-gun strongpost with 2(5 other Australians. Only seven survived. When the patrol’s tommy-gunner was wounded, McLachlan stuck his rifle in the ground to guide stretcher bearers to him. picked up the tommygun and rushed on. After he ran out of ammunition he used the tommy-gun to club a German who had grabbed him by the legs from a trench. He went on to clean up a strongpost with grenades. Then the German artillery caught him and his mates, and with seven others he jumped into a trench on top of German dead. The barrage and covering machinegun fire was so intense that the live Germans in the trenches were themselves afraid to put their heads up. Finally they made a break for their own' lines in ones and twos through withering fire. McLachlan came out of it with only a few scratches, “but. it was three hours of hell,” he said. In addition to his own decoration, his battalion won an M.C., another D.C.M., and two M.M.’s for that show.