EVENTFUL HISTORY

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 53, Issue 32403, 6 March 1944, Page 3

EVENTFUL HISTORY

NEW ZEALAND DIVISION EXPERIENCES IN DESERT GEN. FREYBERG’S SUMMARY Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, V.C., lias written this article for the British Empire Service League magazine:— The changes of fortune in the Middle East since the beginning of the war have been such that the experience of any formation which fought there could not fail to be eventful. The story of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force is a small section of the history, of those years when the barometer of success sunk and rose, and sank and rose again. Greece was our first campaign. We advanced boldly into the Balkans with optimistic hopes which were soon dispelled. The partial life of the Second Anzac Corps was short and the illfated Greek campaign was over almost before it began. Attacked by the full force of the Luftwaffe, supporting a highly mechanised German army, the gallant Greeks in Albania were over-run and the British Expeditionary Force was nearly cut off. Covered by rearguards on the passes, we ran out of Greece at a speed which could only have been bettered by the 90th Light Division after Alamein last year, and we were snatched from the beaches of Marathon and reloponessus by the Royal Navy. Defence Of Crete Next we took part in the defence of Crete, armed only with rifles and light machine-guns, all heavy equipment having been left in Greece. After a ; grim but unequal battle we were driven out, but not before we had blunted Hitler’s air-borne weapon and stopped its forward thrust to Cyprus. 1 Syria and beyond. I Later the same year a re-equipped ■ New Zealand Division took part in the ' Eighth Army’s offensive to relieve Tobruk. In fierce night attacks with the bayonet our infantry captured the ridges of Sidi Rezegh and Belhamed and linked up with the Tobruk garrison, only to be driven off the hardwon ridges by the two German panzer divisions which had defeated the British armour. The mauling the German infantry received at Tobruk, however, was such that they could not j hojd their gains in face of fresh Bri- ! tish attacks. Rommel retreated west- * wards to Agheila, and Tobruk was | I relieved. j Air Superiority j The campaigns in Greece and Crete proved —if proof were needed what air superiority means, and in Libya the world was reminded again that infantry armed with rifles* and bayonets are not a match for tanks. In out proper equipment. But by 1941 common with other divisions from Great Britain and the Dominions, we had learnt by bitter experience the lot of a nation which enters a war withthere were signs that Allied production in England, America and Canada was gaining a momentum which would make up the dangerous leeway. Despite the hopeful signs at the beginning of 1942, the gravest threat to the Suez Canal had still to come. In May and June, 1942, the Eighth Army was defeated at Bir Hacheim and Gazala. Tobruk was lost, Egypt was

invaded and the last line of defence at Alamein was manned. The New Zealand Division arrived in the desert at the end of June after a forced march from Syria, and fought a delaying action on the escarpment south of Mersa Matruh to cover the Eighth Army’s withdrawal. Retreat Stemmed We then played our part in the bitter fighting throughout the heat of an Egyptian summer which finally stabilised the line and stemmed the great retreat. Although the situation could not have looked blacker, the tide was in fact turning. Reinforcements of men and equipiment were flowing into Egypt, including 300 Sherman tanks which President Roosevelt had sent immediately after Tobruk fell. Rommel’s last bid for Alexandria and Cairo at the end of August was broken up by the Royal Air Force and massed British artillery, and in October General Montgomery launched his Alamein offen- ! sive. With British divisions from both north and south of the Tweed, and from Australia, South Africa anl India, we took part in the attack which breached the enemy’s lines and sent Rommel into headlong retreat. It was then that the New Zeal cm Division, with British armoured formations attached to us, came into its own as a fast-moving, hard-hitting force capable of maintaining itself for hundreds of miles. As the spearhead of the Eighth Army, we moved in open formation across the North African deserts in a series of “left hooks." as they were aptly called, through, Cyrenaiea, Tripolitania and Tunisia, outflanking the enemy' every time he tried to hold a line. The “left hooks” turned the enemy out of positions he thought, impregnable at Agheila and the Mareth Line, and saved the great casualties which frontal assaults would have meant. In the last phase when the Allied line closed in on the Axis bridgehead in Tunisia, the New Zealand Division with the Fourth Indian Division opened the final offensive of the British, American and French armies which cleared North Africa of the enemy.