WILD RIDGES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 July 1941, Page 6

WILD RIDGES

MASTERED BY AUSTRALIANS IN THE DAMOUR BATTLE. POSITIONS TAKEN THAT SEEMED IMPREGNABLE. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright*. (Received This Day, 9.45 a.m.) HAIFA. July 6. “You have to see the country in which the Australians made their attack to realise what a challenge it presented to their endurance,” writes the Australian war correspondent anent the Jezzin campaign. “Only mountain goats could negotiate these wild ridges with any case and the speed with which the Australians struggled over the Damour gorge and river and then reformed in line, to advance with the barrage, must have taken the defending Vichy forces by surprise. I remained for some time near an advanced dressing station, where utterly unperturbed farmers, with their families and their flocks, made the scene grotesquely idyllic. A battery of field guns, banging less than, a hundred yards away, 1 produced no more effect upon them than a cloudpassing across the sky. Chickens scratched among earth peppered with shrapnel and farmers nonchalantly plucked cabbages while the scream of metal shrieked in the sky. It was a country where tanks would have been of no value. Even, ammunition for the heavier machine-guns and mortars had to be brought up tortuous mountain tracks on donkeys. The correspondent refers to the withering machine-gun fire which met the Australians after they had clambered up rugged slopes, and to subsequent encounters in the Jezzin sector and adds: "For four days this type of fighting went on, until finally the assaulting troops took what should be impregnable positions and contributed to the safety of the main attack on the coastal sector.”