“OUT ON THEIR OWN”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1941, Page 5

“OUT ON THEIR OWN”

NEW ZEALAND TROOPS DAYS OF HARD AND ;HEAVY FIGHTING. FIERCE BATTLES WITH TANKS & GUNS. LONDON, December 1. The correspondent of the Exchange telegraph agency in a dispatch from an armoured brigade headquarters in Libya says that half of the Axis tanks which participated in the latest thrusts in the Sidi Rezegh area were disabled. The Axis forces throughout the night‘continued the battle with infantry and. tank patrols, trying to break through the British net, and artillery roared throughout the night The Axis guns continuned to shell the New Zealanders’ positions. . ‘ ft The corridor to Tobruk is now 10 miles'wide, says the Cyrenaica correspondent of the Associated Press of Great Britain. British mobile units are raiding the Axis communications at several points west of Tobruk. The New Zealand troops and their supporting tanks have had as hard

fighting as any in the desert campaign, says the Australian war correspond- * ent, Mr John Hetherington, in a message to the Sydney “Sun.” The reason that little has been heard of them is, he says, because nobody has been able to get through. They have been out on their own with pockets of enemy tanks, guns and troops separating them from the other British and Empire forces. Their position on some days has resembled a blockaded island. They have had to rely wholly on the stores which went with them. “Throughout Friday night I travel* , led with an armoured division from " 35 miles south, convoying ammunition, ' food and water to them,” he writes. “Nobody knew within miles when Axis armoured columns might loom up, but k the orders were that the convoy must ’ get through, as it did.” Hetherington spent all Saturday I with the New Zealand Division in the I midst of the fiercest battles with tanks, Ifinfantry and guns, both sides hammerling and surging for mastery. A divisional officer declared, “It’s going to Ke a sticky day. If we can hold them

till nightfall we shall have them where we want them.” The New Zealanders, with the aid of tanks, did hold the enemy, but for a few hours it was very sticky. Indeed, everybody in the New Zealand headquarters breathed freely by nightfall.