NAVY IN ACTION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1941, Page 5

NAVY IN ACTION

OFF THE NORTH COAST OF CRETE WATCHED BY NEW ZEALANDERS. DESTRUCTION OF ENEMY | CONVOY. I ißy Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F. in Crete.) CAIRO. June 2. Crete. May 23: As if we had grandstand seats in a huge batlie area, hundreds of New Zealanders have watched a gripping midnight drama in which the British Navy sent the best part of a German invasion fleet to the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Crete. The fruits of brilliant, intelligence work had been used to the full by warships, which cruised outside the point where the landing was known to have been intended, and so for us it was like awaiting the curtain to rise in a theatre. It was near midnight when heavy shellfire awakened me from a doze, and I hurried to a hilltop overlooking the shore positions, which were held by a New Zealand force. A red inferno on the horizon showed that the Navy had already found a target at what seemed no more than 10 miles out. Then, suddenly, the silver beam of a searchlight was flung across the water, and it caught perhaps a dozen small ships in line, each gleaming in the light as if coated with luminous paint. The naval gunners took their cue from the revelations of the searchlight, and a terrific battle raged. Big guns flashed and roared, and incendiary shells chased one another across the sky in strings of glowing red balls. Again the searchlight threw a brilliant beam over the enemy flotilla, and again the big guns boomed till at last, when the light was swung through a complete circle, it seemed to us that the sea was clear save for two burning ships, one of which was convulsed spasmodically by fierce explosions. A calm sea next morning held no signs of life. I had another grandstand view last night of a scene which also told its own story of the tremendous cost of the German invasion. In a battlereddened sunset I looked down across the coastal plain on whose seaward fringe lies the Malemi aerodrome, now being used by the Germans to land infantry and supplies. The checkered quilt of cultivated fields had become a Luftwaffe junkyard, since the wrecked bulks of transport planes and gliders lay at odd angles along it as far as the eye could see.

Every 200 yards down the shingle beach was the broken shape of a crashed machine, and many more littered the groves and riverbeds. The wreckage was thick round the aerodrome, where British anti-aircraft guns and our own field artillery have made the German landing operations a costly, wasteful affair. Even as I watched big carrier planes were droning in from the sea, as they had done almost continuously for two days. Skimming the water, they reached the aerodrome one by one, landed in a flurry of dust, and took off again after discharging their loads and possibly embarking fatigued and wounded paratroops. But our guns were still firing, too, and those wreckage heaps must have been growing.