DEEDS OF DARING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 February 1941, Page 5

DEEDS OF DARING

IN THE LIBYAN DESERT 1 f — WORK OF LONG-RANGE PATROLS I — I 'new ZEALANDERS PLAY ACTIVE : PART. ENEMY HARRIED IN GUERILLA WARFARE. (From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East.) CAIRO. February 13. Across thousands of miles of liltle-known and often unni?i]q>ed enemy territory. Xew Zealanders for seven months have be<‘n helping io write a most amazing chapter of the story of the war in Xorth Africa. Officers and men specially chosen from cavalry and machine-gun units formed the nucleus of motorised patrols which have been swooping and darling in swift trucks throughout the' length and breadth of Libya like mod-, cm outlaws, and whose work had an extremely important bearing on the success of the British advance along the coastal belt. Long before this main push began the Italian forces at wells, forts and aerodromes in the Libyan interior were rudely but mysteriously shaken from their sense of security by the first daring raids of our desert pirates. Only today is the story revealed how for months past the enemy have been kept on the alert and made to expend ! petrol for aircraft and transport in pro-1 tecting their desert garrisons, and how I our phantom motor columns have fal-| len on supply columns, shelled and| captured isolated forts, blown up* dumps, and burnt aircraft on the; ground. j The activities of these patrols-, which; form an organisation called the "long-! range desert group," gave Now Zea-1 landers in the Middle East a first real opportunity to provo themselves in! warfare. While their fellow-members of the expeditionary force vainly waited a taste of battle, the New Zealand officers and men in this long-range desert group were meeting action aplenty.

Often through sand storms and extremes of heat and cold the patrols to which they belonged covered half a million truck miles in pioneering the new form of military operation. Guided by the navigating genius and experience of three Englishmen over desert wastes that are marked on the maps as impassable or are not marked at all. they aupeared in one place and then anoine*. ’ '» several points at once, sometimes'” nu.. * u “> Egyptian frontier and sometimes im,. away in the west. SWIFT BLOWS STRUCK.

They struck swift blows and vanished before the baffled enemy could assess their striking force, and they touched the Chad Territory and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan as they ranged far and wide. Patrols were twice caught in the open desert and bombed for more than an hour by three aircraft. but skilful manoeuvring of the trucks helped them to escape unharmed. In the first main expedition three columns of trucks crawled through 200 miles of towering sand dunes in September as the first military force ever to cross the “Great Sand Sea.” The New Zealanders rapidly adapted themselves to the weird dune country, though on the first day their trucks floundered helplessly axle-deep in almost liquid sand. One or two of the trucks, when the drivers were confused by the blinding yellow glare, fell over the brink of a huge dune, rolling over and over for 100 feet, but without harm being done. Soon the drivers were able to tackle any obstacle confidently.

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A London cablegram states that the long-range desert group was commanded by a lieutenant-colonel famed as an explorer of the Libyan desert who was formerly a British official in the Egyptian Survey Department and a member of the Palestine Department of Antiqui-

Prior to the first main expedition in September the vanguard of the British force, comprising otic British and live New Zealand officers, with two light cars. crossed the sandy waste and travelled 200 miles west of Kufra and then to the Benghazi area, returning after days in the desert studying wheel-marks and extracting a wealth of information by other means.