EARLIER EVENTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 November 1941, Page 5

EARLIER EVENTS

POWERFUL NAZI THRUST REPELLED BY SINGLE ARMOURED UNIT. DAY & NIGHT BATTLES. (By Telegraph—Press Association-Copyright) LONDON, Novembei 25. The ‘-Daily Express” correspondent with the Eighth Army, in a dispatch which was delayed since November 23, says:’“The coastal road from El Adem (near Tobruk) to Bardia is jammed with a great mass of enemy troops, guns and transport slowly moving westward. German tanks ana artillery, which are moving ahead, have been trying for 36 hours to blitz their way through the British lines. “General Rommel left the Italian division and other Axis units in the Bardia and Halfaya Pass areas to their fates while he gambled everything on breaking through westward. For 12 hours a single English armoured unit held Rommel back. “It was the same unit that took Capuzzo 18 months ago. On the Sidi Rezegh airfield the unit was outnumbered almost three to one, and though the front ranks were decimated it held out till it was relieved. Every manbrigadier. staff officers, cipher clerks took to the guns at critical moments. This morning the unit's regimental colours were still flying, and it was pieparing to go into the barrage again. “On November 22 the German heavy guns which for seven months had been pounding Tobruk were turned on the English unit in preparation for a counter-attack. The enemy possessed enough guns to keep the air shuddering with thunder, and men could be seen scampering from the rolling black smoke of the heavy shells through which vehicles dashed back and forth. “The British mobile artillery ceaselessly crept through the barrage to new positions among escarpment rocks overlooking El Adem. The actual fighting front was ever changing and often obscured by the drifting smoke, dust and flame. Ground bombing was followed by intensive dive-bombing by Stukas “As darkness" fell the Germans, by sheer weight of metal, closed in on the Sidi Rezegh airfield, and as we moved back the Germans advanced stabbing anywhere through the night, but our machine-guns did not rest. At dawn the shelling was redoubled and the horizon again disappeared in smoke.” The correspondent in a later dispatch says that in the late afternoon of November 24 Italians from the west and Germans from the north-east cut through the base of the tongue of British territory running up to Tobruk from the south, and more than 100 German tanks fell on a South African formation. Germans were seen right inside the South African camp. A British armoured formation was rushed to the scene and flung its tanks into the first night action of the campaign, and before dawn 25 German and seven Italian tanks were destroyed, excluding the tanks demolished by the South Africans.

“Only a small proportion of Rommel’s 280 tanks which were originally in this area are now mobile. Between Tobruk and Bardia the Germans brought only half a dozen tanks against us, and they have been forced back westward. “Incredible mix-ups are occurring all over the battlefield. British and German units frequently unknowingly camp within a mile of each other. A German radio van once lumbered through the British headquarters and was captured intact. Lost vehicles, even convoys, are roaming in all directions over the desert.