TWO GRAND SHOWS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 October 1941, Page 6

TWO GRAND SHOWS

EXPERIENCES IN WESTERN DESERT GREAT NUMBER OF AIRCRAFT IN FIELD. SOME HEARTENING SIGNS. (Official War Correspondent N.Z.E.F.) WESTERN DESERT, September 29. We saw two grand shows here yesterday. In nature they were poles apart —one intensely real, the spectacle of more British planes than we had ever seen in the desert before massing for a daylight attack; the other purely fictitious, a Hollywood film programme in surroundings that could not have been stranger. We counted a great number of aircraft in the sky at noon. The fighters appeared first, three great droves of them, manoeuvring in a wide circle to take battle formation above, behind and around the fast American-built bombers which came droning out of the east in perfect threes. The whole huge"’ sky force circled for height and then flew westwards and out of our sight. The noise in the sky was the deepthroated roar and rumble that is the sound of weight of numbers—the sound which in our most hard-pressed days we thought must be the prerogative of the Germans. Long before this is printed a communique will most likely have told of bombs dropped on ships, dumps and stores at Benghazi or Tripoli and of troops and transport columns machine-gunned on the roads. It will not matter if the communique is short and laqonic, for that will mean that these mass raids are no mere novelty. ' Heartening signs like this—more troops, more guns, more planes—are all around us. As dusk fell yesterday and we gathered under the sky for a padre’s evening service, heavy bombers lifted off. the desert one by one and flew past us, perhaps to clinch by moonlight the operations begun a few hours earlier by the daylight raiders. And by the time the enemy had started his lame attempt at reprisals that night—dull, spasmodic rumbles and flashes far in the west, told us about it—we were absorbed in our second show. We sat on the cold sand and watched the most famous of Hollywood’s movie detectives unravel a thrilling murder mystery on a screen slung from the side of an Army truck. Desert talkies are a new Y.M.C.A. service made possible by the contributions of the New Zealand people to patriotic funds. They have already proved themselves a complete success. The equipment is so easily portable that the programmes can be brought right to each unit’s door. Provision of entertainments in the field must be the most extraordinary of the non-strategical changes we have found on our return to the desert. The N.Z.E.F.’ is perhaps better off . in this respect than any other formation, for apart from the Y.M.C.A. cinema unit there is another which is run by the padres, and in addition there is ihe force’s own “Kiwi Conceit Party which intends to make regular visits.. Football is in the air again, too, m the Western Desert. Grounds are the big difficulty, but, it will be overcome just as it was last year, when, most games were played more for their fun ■ and exercise than as seriously competitive events. It should not be thought, nowever, that the accent is being placed on entertainment and recreation at this stage of the career of the N.Z.E.F. These are days of serious training under tne conditions peculiar to the Western Desert. There are battle exercises and motorised treks almost every day.