QUICK CAPTURE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1942, Page 4

QUICK CAPTURE

MADE BY TWO BRITISH SOLDIERS EPISODE IN WESTERN DESERT. SOME DETAILS OF ENEMY PROPAGANDA. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.50 a.m.) RUGBY, December 29. Diving into an enemy trench in the Western Desert to take cover from shellfire when his lorry was crippled, a British sergeant-major found it full of Germans and Italians, who immediately surrendered at the point of his revolver. His only companion had left his rifle in the lorry. The episode occurred while the two men were in rapid retreat from the enemy lines, where they found themselves, at the first light, having overshot their own, tanks. The sergeantmajor said: “While we were there, I talked to a finely-built young German from the 21st • Panzer Division. He thought we were bound to win in Africa. He added that' if he had been a Russian he would never have given himself up. ‘They always fight to the death,’ he said. He also gave us an interesting slant on German propaganda, assuring us that the Dieppe raid and the thousand bomber raids were myths. He was convinced that the U-boat blockade of the Atlantic was so complete that we should be starved into surrender by next summer.”