MODERN WARFARE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 February 1941, Page 9

MODERN WARFARE

! INSTRUCTION WITH SOUND EFFECTS LIVE ROUNDS USED. A BLOOD-TINGLING DIN. (From the Official War Correspondent attached to the N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East.) EGYPT, January 24. The dull thunder of field guns in. action is reverberating this morning among desert hills and valleys only a mile or two out of this New Zealand camp. It is part of the very real "sound effects" of a course of instruction in modern warfare which all the infantry battalions, assisted by machine gun companies and batteries of artillery. are at present undergoing. Live rounds —smoke and high explosive shells and mortar, light and medium machine gun ammunition —are being used with extraordinary effect to simulate battle conditions. Troops in training are accustomed to being re-

quired. more often that not. merely to imagine artillery barrages and supporting machine gun fire. In the mock attacks in which they are now taking part, however, the presence of an enemy force is almost the only factor left to supposition. Each battalion has been taking it in turn to advance from the cover of the side of a desert valley behind a barrage of shellfire, and with machine gun bullets spitting past them. Much praise is heard of the way in which the artillery detachments have been putting to the best possible advantage the necessarily limited amount of live ammunition that can be available for training purposes in time of actual war. To unaccustomed eyes and ears at least, the accurate and well-co-ordin-ated fire seems to form an extremely intense and damaging barrage. The whole movement each day has been a thrilling show in all its episodes —the sight of the infantrymen filing in sections up the slope of the ghostly, barren valley; the crack of the field guns below them, the whine of the shells curving above their heads, and the flashes of red flame in the billowing. drifting smoke over the enemy positions; Bren carriers dashing out under a screen of their own dust to set up light machine gun. positions: and then the machine-guns themselves joining in the confused clatter and thunder that is the blood-tingling din of battle.

Colourful spectacle though it may be the "parade-ground" soldiery—band music, marching columns, precise drill movements —which the public knows best has no dramatic splendour to compare with the sight of infantry attacking in open formation. As the ground ahead is blasted with high explosives and the hail of machine-gun fire reaches its - peak, you see a company commander’s upflung arm bring his men to their feet like a magnet. They break from their cover, calmly and unhurriedly, and spread themselves out in thin, seemingly uneven lines. Other groups are moving on the right and left, and soon these thin lines stretch across perhaps half a mile, and arc pushing like a slow, gentle wave across the stretch of oj>en desert. Still calm, unhurried, its mood strangely contrasting with the high-pitched activity of the guns behind it, the wave rolls hundreds of yards closer to the smokefilled enemy strongholds. The big guns drop out of the cacophony of noice. and the rattle of machine-gun fire becomes loss intense. Simultaneously the mood of the infantrymen. who look like black ants on the brown sand, changes. I’hey must be meeting enemy fire, for some of them are dropping to the ground and squinting along their rifles, and two or three small groups have run ahead to the lee of a knoll. Those are mortar crews, raising the stovepipe muzzles of their squat weapons to lob explosives into the stubborn enemy ranks. A tew minutes of this, and the infantrymen are on iheir feet again, running hard. The murk of the smoke screen swallows them up. It is like the curtain falling on the play as the last blow is struck.