DESERT WRECKAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1941, Page 5

DESERT WRECKAGE

ENEMY COLUMNS RENT BY AIR ATTACK MANY GERMAN PRISONERS BROUGHT IN. BRITISH ROVING COLUMNS SENT OUT. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 9.52 a.m.) RUGBY, December 1. Shattered, rent and torn, German tanks and motorised units, destroyed by Imperial fighter and bomber squadrons, are scattered over the Libyan desert, states the Air Ministry News Service, quoting the report of an observer who spent a day inspecting these bat tered and derelict vehicles. “Where an attack by our bombers had halted a column,” the report states, “tangled wrecks of some panzer regiment, blackened and twisted, littered three miles of the desert. Ammunition and petrol lorries, now misshapen heaps of iron, shared the fate of the tanks. Three workshop lorries, carrying machine tools and engineer-

ing material, had been hit in an attack by our fighters. Spread over some miles were remnants of thirty or forty vehicles. They also had been strafed by fighters and bombed by Hurri? bombers. On the way to the scene of the battle, I viewed German lorries salvaged by the Air Force and Army.” An agency correspondent with the forces states, that many Germans fell into British hands. From early morning a long column of lorries could be seen on the road outside the Tobruk perimeter, packed with prisoners. He states that there is very • little enemy air participation in the fighting. Newly established British columns, equipped with supplies, set out on roving commissions and are harassing the enemy.

ITALIAN REPORT (Received This Day, 10 a.m.) LONDON, December 1. A Rome communique stated that there is local fighting at Mamarica, with artillery activity on the Tobruk and Solium fronts. The German and Italian air force carried out raids against motorised units, railway lines and supply centres at Mersa Matruh.

VERITABLE INFERNO GERMAN ACCOUNT OF BATTLE. (Received This Day, 9.45 a.m.) STOCKHOLM, December 1. The Germans are now describing the battle in Libya as a battle for supplies. The “Lokal Anzeiger” says: “The battle our soldiers are experiencing in the desert must be a veritable inferno.”