WAR IN LIBYA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 February 1941, Page 8

WAR IN LIBYA

PART OF NEW ZEALANDERS DRIVE INTO TOBRUK. — TRIUMPH OF BRITISH PUSH. ■ (From the Official War Correspondent ’ attached to the N.Z.E.F. in the i Middle East). EGYPT. January 26. Motor transport drivers, signals personnel and engineers have again represented the N.Z.E.F. in a further development of the war on the Libyan front —the drive into Tobruk, which makes this week’s chief news in the Middle East. Once more our part has been played behind the scenes, but it is no less important on that account. These detachments of the New Zea-' land force may justly lay claim to a share in the triumph of the British westward push. Each one of them has had the responsibility of building up and maintaining some part of the intricate organisation which makes possible the swift and successful movements of the actual fighting troops. Thousands of front-line soldiers look to the New Zealand Army Service Corps for their supply of food, ammunition. petrol and oil. and sometimes for transportation to fresh objectives. They depend on “signals" for the rapid transmission of their plans of action and of the up-to-the-minute information on which those pace and volume of the desert freight their interests in a score of ways, setting up field workshops and depots behind them, and what is most important’ among the duties of the New Zea-j land sappers in Libya, maintaining water supply points and exploring j fresh sources. ARMY SERVICE CORPS. With hundreds of vehicles on roads and tracks on both sides of the border, the Army Service Corps operates' a freight and passenger carrying business that is staggering in its dimen--sions and capacity. Many of the men tit the wheel are drivers by trade—among them you might easily find your bus driver of 18 months ago. or the man who drove your grocer’s truck —but few have known conditions anywhere approaching those under which they work today. Yet they seem to like the job, or at the very least they prefer doing the work to not doing it. An officer of one company declared recently that his men would rather stay up half the night checking over their vehicles than let some other transport column take their place on the road next day. The pace and volume of the desert freight traffic means that time for truck maintenance is always short, but the mechanical skill of the drivers, together with the facilities available al company workshops, helps the New Zealand transport men to maintain their high traditions of service.

CROSSING THE NILE, The detachments still actively engaged in this way in the Libyan campaign see little nowadays of their fellow New Zealanders in the infantry, artillery, cavalry, machine-gun and similar units. These fighting components of the N.Z.E.F.. however, are by no means idle, for an intensive training programme is equipping them for action as a larger formation than that in which they stood guard on lines of communication and manned defensive positions during Italy's short-lived threat of invading Egypt. Iwo spectacular forms of training have inaugurated the programme. One of these is the crossing of the River Nile, both by day and by night, by soldiers on foot and army vehicles alike. '1 he infantrymen make the crossing in collapsible assault boats, which are propelled with paddles, or in larger craft pulled along a rope stretched from one bank to the other. Transport equipment is shipped across with remarkable ease and speed on various types of rail, in the assembly and use of which engineers have had special training.

Several units have carried out, the river crossing as part of a mock attack, with enemy objectives supposedly sited on the far bank. This scheme has lent realism to the training, since : it has kept the men's minds off the • mere novelty of ‘‘putting alloal" and ] opened their eyes to tht factors they I would have to lake heed of in actual war conditions. .After moving a little ! gingerly at first to avoid the remotest j chance of failing into the Nile, whose j waters are not attractive in their na- ■ tural state, all units have handled the ! boats extremely well.