IN RETROSPECT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 February 1942, Page 4

IN RETROSPECT

RECENT LIBYAN BATTLE EXPERIENCES AND INCIDENTS. EVIDENCE OF AXIS LOSSES. (N.Z.E.F. Official News Service.) CAIRO, December 31. For the New Zealanders back at their Western Desert base, the battle for Libya in retrospect becomes as a whole more clearly defined. Experiences and incidents take distinct shape. Out 1 of the letter there comes to mind the picture of a long, weaving convoy of laden vehicles speeding up an asphalt road—the road back. It was the road leading out of Tobruk, and the New Zealand convoy was the first organised exodus of troops following the reopening of the Corridor. Not many hours before, the last Axis opposition in that little triangle outside the perimeter had been overcome. The enemy had retired westwards, licking his wounds as he went. Far behind him he had left scattered pockets of futile resistance, pockets of desperate men who had been unable to break through the tightening British and Imperial cordons. To all appearances, the first and most important phase in the fight' for North African—and Mediterranean —security was over, and we had definitely won the round. Now, this —the first New Zealand convoy to leave Tobruk —was on the road back. A day before it would doubtless have been impossible. Now it was becoming an accomplished fact. It was in the cold, half-misty light of a winter dawn. At the Tobruk crossroads, where the Derna Road turns at right-angle to the main Bardia Highway, or carries on to twist and climb through the ragged, white-washed buildings of the town, the customary nonchalant figure of the English Provost Corporal who all day directs three steady streams of traffic, had not yet arrived. Truck after truck, the convoy took the angle turn that swept them uphill, past the great prisoner-of- ' war cage, alohg a highway that was bound on either side by vast minefields, on towards the outside of the perimeter. Slowly, the white hill-town and the narrow blue inlet filled with drunken hulks of Italian ships slipped from view. But the storm-centre of the Tobruk Perimeter had the last word. Suddenly, from a long grey escarpment to the south-west, came the whine of shells. It was from Dahar el Mdauuar, strongly fortified position behind which much of Rommel’s force had sheltered, and from which during the past week Tobruk harbour had been subjected to laughably erratic attempts at bombardment. Whistling high over the cohvoy, the shells burst harmlessly in an area of waste land about a mile away. A long line of Italian prisoners came wheeling their barrows down the edge of the road. For them it was just the start of another day, just like yesterday and the day before, and probably just like tomorrow and all those other tomorrows, until the final victory comes to the Allies. Some of them grinned and waved. They are good-humoured, pathetic creatures. It is hard to be angry with them. And so the convoy left Tobruk. A week before it had entered warily by the too-revealing light of a threequarter moon, leaving behind it the familiar battleground of Sidi Rezegh, where a new and determined German thrust was fast developing. About 20 trucks in that convoy had been crammed with prisoners, many of them Germans, captured by New Zealanders during a hard day of fighting. They were to join those thousands of others already securely quartered in the great prison cage in the Tobruk Perimeter, the cage which had been built by Graziani. Slowly the convoy had crept round the almost new road specially constructed by the Germans to bypass the perimeter. Now it was a different route. Boldly the leading trucks struck out along the main Bardia road. At the last control post, at the edge of the perimeter, they zig-zagged through the barricades, while a group of cheery Tommies, tinhalted and curious, watched them slip past. A few miles further on was a brightly coloured notice in German, demanding all vehicles to stop. Not far away lay a broken-down German truck, which had stopped for the last time. As the convoy pushed eastwards, evidence increased of the losses suffered by Rommel’s mechanical army. Derelict tanks with battered, blackened turrets stood like dejected Frankensteins surveying their own desolation. A wing-tip poking over the scrub told a story of yet another German reconnaissance plane which was effectively stopped from taking its message back to headquarters. A few yards off the road there was a tiny but picturesque Italian cemetery. Cairns of white stones, in neat rows, marked the last resting places of men who had been led to destruction against their own judgment. As the convoy turned its back on the sea and set off on its two days’ journey across the desert, there were many in whose minds there will always remain a picture of that little Italian cemetery by the roadside. They were going back to their friends, and at the turn of a new year. But for those men lying there, there would be no new year; there was no road back.