SLIT TRENCH

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5290, 31 December 1946, Page 3

SLIT TRENCH

The appeal that was published in this column a short while ago for ex-members of the various units to get together and torm committees to compile local unit histories does.not seem to have had much effect and in Rotorua there appears to be only one unit that is preparing to plaee itself on the map - of posterity; The culling of information for these personal unit histories should not be an onerous duty* — in fact, it should be a very pleasant one. We would imagine that a unit historian could get a far better story over a pot of ale than he could at a formal interview'.

Although it is irapossible to fintl out the exact number of returnecl men in Rotorua, it would be safe enough to estimate that they are in the region of 2000. Working on hypothetical hgures again one could' assume that at least half of these men were in thp army and that most of these were in the - Auckland district units, viz., the 18th, 21st, and 24th Battalions and the 28th" Maori Battalion. From what can 'be gathered around the town, only one unit — the 24th Batallion — has really got weaving. All over the Auckland province their committees are keeping their ears open and jotting down anything- that they think might be suitable for the ■ battalion's history. ; Of other units we hear nothing. | Why not? Rotorua supplied over 600 men to the Maori Battalion alone and yet as far as we can see, nothing has been done to get a personal story from this famous unit. Eventually, whether Rotorua subscribes to them or not, each and every member of a unit in the 2nd Division is going to get a volume of its unit's history. He is going to pore through the pages expecting to find all the little tit-bits relating to his own personal experiences and he is going to get a bit peeved because there isn't any referenee to himself and his Rot- j orua cobbers. And the reason will be because he has not se'nt anythiivg along. The chief unit historians in j Wellington are not clairvoyant — they obviously can't record facts that they are jnaware of.

Another point — don't think that you haven't got anything worth pubishing. Don't say to^yourself, "Oh, my experiences weren't anything out of the ordinary and wouldn't interest any one." Your experiences -are just as interestirig as anyone elses.' bo get together, and sort out the most likely hloke to record your reminiscences and put yourself on the map — it doesn't cost anything. Just over four years ago at 9.30 o'cloclc at night the silence of the desert was shattered by the 'blast of a mighty host of British guns. There was a brilliant moon. Over an arch of 63 miles from the salt marshes in the north to the impassable wastes and ravines of the Qattara Depression in the south, tens of thousands of men lay in hidiing in tjhjs ca^mel'l thorn beside the dusty trail and on the. rocky plateaux of the E1 Alamein Desert. •> Eight hundred guns at 23-yard intervals were hidden iunder camouflaged netting. At the zero hour this fury was let lofose and tjhe turning point in the war of the west had come. Ten months latcr, the British Eightli Army, with American forces from North Africa, were on tlie shores of Italy. To-day, October 23, 1946, writes a U.S. correspondent, I went to E1 Alamein. The desert was bathed in peace. Fluff, a little, woolly, whitc mongrel dog was dozing in the setting sun and Susie, a black eat,'was stalking little desert birds just where four years ago the Ninth Australian Division had crashed through the dennan lines. The desert soon forgets its battle scars. To-day, in the light of the setting sun, there was only silence, sand and stones, and the black dots of BedO'Uin tents. Unlike the landscape in Europe, where war has left wounds that will 'be so long in h ealing, the greatest battlefield of the desert is washed1 almost clean of its destruction md debris. j Here and there, like hulks- on a deserted shore, burnt-out tanks and fcrucks lie blackening- on the sand. Barbed wire, sagging and rusted, still stretches dts long arms across the lesert. As if a hor.de of gypsies had lorne and gone, the litter of tin cans still lines the road. I But the welter of v/ar has gone. j [t has gone in the trucks of Egyptian contractors who have con/erted this sci-ap into something" nore useful. The Bedouins have taken it to build their sheds and shacks. And Rnally, the sand has swirled bacjk md buried the remainder in grit;y oblivion. The great under-ground rospital, almost on the fringes of the lattlefield, vith its intricate passages md scores of stone-walled ^ard's, is illing with sand, it has become a nest >f. snakes and scorpions. Where British 'and German mine ields faced each other across the 'idge, there is nothing more than two. »'ranite pillars to anark the site. E1 Alamein is no longer a battleield, it .is a memorial. The silence las surged softly backward, smotherng the scenes of violence in oblivion —and in the hope that men. in their.