DESERT EPISODES
ARMY TRUCK ROCKETS INTO AIR. UNSUSPECTED SAND RIPPLE ENCOUNTERED. (New Zealand Official News Service.) CAIRO. April 4. Exceeding fifty miles an hour across a stretch of desert, a British army truck struck an unsuspected sand ripple and rocketed into the air, crashed 54 feet away and spread-eagled its four wheels so that the front and rear axles rested on the ground. As a result, the New Zealand driver, short, powerfully-built, ginger-haired and freckled, appeared later with plaster on the side of his head. Bruised and with skin removed from various limbs, he was more concerned with the loss of the truck than the damage to himself. He and his companions, members of the Long Range Desert Group, were seen next day intently occupied with their trucks, tinkering here and there with a spanner, paying particular attention to the most trivial of adjustments. It was not easy for a visitor to attract their attention, except perhaps to pass a comment on an unusual type of vehicle as it entered the wide asphalt yard; in fact, it was not unlike the activity one expected to find at an aerodrome. Half-a-dozen English soldiers unloading a large field gun from a sixwheeler ten-ton' truck, no easy task involving the use of a winch supplemented by not inconsiderable muscular effort and a series of rapid commands from an N.C.0., seemed quite an interesting operation, but earned no further attention from the busy members of the patrol beyond one terse comment: “We will be able to get some of our own back with that. - ’ Unlike the fresh ruddy-cheeked Tommies one sees in Egypt, these Now Zealanders gave the appearance of having a tough hide evenly tanned, the result of long months in the deserts of North-east Africa. There was a group including a patrol navigator and Trooper D. Moore hero of the ten-day i trek from Bishara, looking at photographs taken at the wadi where one of their patrols had been ambushed. Cn the sand near a burnt-out British motor-vehicle lay an Italian taken prisoner in an earlier engagement by the’patrol, shot down by the machineguns of his own army and left where he had fallen.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 May 1941, Page 3
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362DESERT EPISODES Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 May 1941, Page 3
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