GENERAL FREYBERG

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 May 1941, Page 6

GENERAL FREYBERG

ACTS AS “TRAFFIC COP”

ON CONGESTED ROAD IN GREECE.

NEW ZEALANDERS DENY DEFEAT.

(By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 12.44 p.m.) (N.Z.E.F. OFFICIAL NEWS SERVICE) CAIRO, May 6. Despite a fortnight of steady withdrawal before constant divebombing by the powerful Luft-, waffe, and harassing machine-gun fire, the men of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force who have returned to the Middle East from Greece do not consider that they were beaten by the German armies. In fact there is a sense of satisfaction and exhilaration in their bearing. They say the Luftwaffe came over in waves of from 24 to 79 planes, at regular intervals of about a quarter of an hour. A battery attacked by 27 divebombers for nearly an hour did not suffer one casualty, although a bomb landed about two yards from a trench and showered its occupants with earth. So unrestricted was the work of the Luftwaffe that there is at least one instance of three Messerschmitts intently chasing a single despatch-rider along a flat road. A padre with a New Zealand fighting unit conducted a church parade for a few men gathered together in a hollow cn Easter Sunday. Less than ten minutes after the conclusion of the service, artillery members of the congregation rushed back to their guns to open fire cn the Germans. On Anzac Day, at 8 a.m., the same padre sat with his unit in an olive grove alongside a bridge. They wore bombed from dawn to dusk, but they did not lose one man. In the Battle of Greece the Maoris proved themselves really first-class fighting men. The Greeks called them happy warriors, because they displayed so much enthusiasm for their work, but the Germans must have thought them demons from hell, with all the ferocity of expression at their command and no doubt their fiendish war cries and the flashing of the whites of their eyes. Having first succeeded in getting too close to the enemy to permit the effective use of a tommy-gun, the Maoris made a bayonet charge before which not even German shock troops could stand their ground. Major-General Freyberg was seen with his men on the beaches of Greece, asking after their welfare. He stood in the open by a battery to observe the course of the battle while the Germans were shelling all round. When traffic on a road became too congested, the Genera! himself dismounted from his car and took up point duty at a crossroad.

The embarkation was carried out without a hitch. A gunner who reached the beach with only the clothes he stood in, marched straight on to a pontoon which had been run up to the shore and was conveyed almost immediately to a cruiser, aboard which he found a cup of cocoa waiting for him. The Navy was splendid, .but some New Zealanders had equal praise for the Tommies, whose stubbornness and fight-, ing qualities rivalled those of the best troops of the Empire.