AWAITING ATTACK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 November 1940, Page 8

AWAITING ATTACK

PREPARATIONS FOR NAZI INVASION MANNING OF VITAL POINTS. NEW ZEALANDERS’ PART. (From the Official War Correspondent attached to the New Zealand Forces in Great Britain). SOMEWHERE IN BRITAIN, Oct. 7. They were London troops who manned the searchlight post on the crest of a south coast ridge that we visited on one of our exercises last month. We had come up to them just at early dusk, and “stood to’’ immediately. Bren guns, anti-tank rifles or formidableseeming infantry filled their eye wherever they looked —except south-east where white horses played on the darkening surface of the English Channel. “ 'Ope ’e comes tonight now that you chaps are ’ere,” said one of the Tommies, as he leaned against the door of his hut. “Won’t ’alf be seasick before ’e gets ashore,” suggested another. “No,” agreed the first, glancing down the stiff slope to the sea. “Nor won’t 'alf be out o’ poof by time ’e gets up ’ere.” We had no opportunity of testing either theory. “He” did not come. He has l not come yet on the scale and across the element then expected. And by now the conditions are trebly against him. The days are shorter and the nights much colder; the sea, still the foremost rampart of England, is rougher; and the nation’s preparations to receive him are complete.

For four weeks we have been a forward unit in those preparations. In the major sense they have been four weeks of inactivity, because the threat against which we stand guard has remained no more than a threat. If we consider the possibility of its yet being fulfilled—as Mr Churchill warns us we must —then the period will prove io have been invaluable training. High authorities averred before we came out here into the field that the Second Echelon was as ready for war as ever it could be without actual experience of war. That experience continues to evade us; but I believe those same authorities would agree that our spell in the coast defence line, or next door to it, has given the men something which, for all their readiness, they did not have previously. Although they have not experienced warfare, they have experienced its constant imminence. Back where we were before, the sound of bombs was almost a nine days’ wonder. We heard plenty of enemy planes—or what our then inexpert ears told us were enemy planes —and we were used to daily air raid warnings. But we would walk a couple of miles to see a bomb crater, and we listened open-mouthed to the tales of our comrades when they came back from special training courses or leave in the actively-bombed, areas. Here, things have been vastly different. Day and night, the air above us is full of war. We see it waged. We meet its results. We have long since realised that at any moment, waking or sleeping, we may be brought within its orbit. Thus far we have been amazingly fortunate; only once have we been touched, and then but slightly. By the law of averages, however, our immunity cannot last for ever; and the thought, as it brings us a step nearer the real thing that civilians are enduring with such heroic fortitude, has made us a little more serious than.we were a month ago. It has added a toughening fibre to preparedness. One may not go into details of what we have been doing in special preparation of our present role, nor indicate what this is, beyond saying that if land war comes to England we are to have a hard, fighting part right after the New Zealand heart. The boys are ready for it. They have lost a little of their parade-ground smartness and &iap; there are no buttons to polish on battle dress, and their absence induces a slightly undisciplined state of mind toward the trappings of the military life.

“Fight!” said one of pur colonels, who plainly considers his battalion the finest between Narvik and Nairobi. “They’re ready to fight anybody, but we'll have to teach them again to march. It’s fighting that counts in the end; but all the rest helps.” He ought to know; he was in the ranks last time.

They’ll soon pick up their step again. I stood in the dark at a village crossroads two night ago and saw one of the forward battalions, withdrawn at dusk from its battle position, go swinging past to its embussing point. The men were singing; not hilariously ox* defiantly, but quietly and purposefully, as we have been told their fathers sang in the ravines of Gallipoli and the mud of Flanders. Platoon after platooxx came out of the night, wheeled on the corner and vanished again into the night. Over their heads as they came in we looked east, to where giant flashlamps were flickering on and off at sealevel on the French coast —the R.A.F. pasting the invasion fleet and harbour, at Calais. As they went down the side road to the buses they looked straight ahead at the nightly fireworks display given by oui’ anti-aircraft batteries. . . . At the close of the afternoon they had seen, a mile ox - two away, a string of enemy bombers dive one after - one on a little undefended town. . . . They marched as they sang, not faultlessly, it is true, but with the grim determination of resolute men who knew why they were there and where they were going.