ALLIED LANDINGS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 November 1943, Page 3

ALLIED LANDINGS

NEW ZEALAND TELEGKAHHI S I IN FOUR. DIEPPE RATED “WORST OF LOT.” (By Telegraph—i Press Association— Copyright) LONDON, Nvember 17. Dieppe, Oran, Sicily and Messina—a Christchurch telegraphist. R. D. Mitchell, has taken part in all these landings. He rates Dieppe as “the worst of fhe lot,” with Sicily taking second place. He went ashore in Sicily with the Eighth Army at Marina Davola. “We went in just before dawn,” he said. “It was my job to help in arranging to send signals back from the beach to the ships. As we went in, coastal batteries fired on us. but put their shells over the stern. There was also an ‘ltie’ using a machinegun but firing six feet over our heads. The 'army soon fixed him, and once ,we landed things were not so bad, and we soon got the signals working. We stayed there for about a week. “When we crossed the Straits of Messina to Reggio I went with the Canadians. We started a quarter of an hour before the creeping barrage stopped. The gun flashes lit up everything like daylight, and we sat in the landing craft, occasionally sipping rum, and listening to the shells screech overhead. We met no oppositon when we landed; in fact, the Italians had already bundled up their belongings ready to be marched to prison camps, but many of them found they had to stay and help clear up the beaches so we could get the tanks and trucks ashore. We did not see any Germans, but they worried us with mortar fire for a while.

“I spent a month in Italy, part of the time in Taranto. I was also with working parties helping to open the beaches to get in supplies before the ports were opened.”

Mitchell is now in England, and also with him are telegraphists W. J. Smyth, Ruatoria,' and S. F. Speed. Auckland, who were telegraphists in an escort ship which took part in the Salerno operations, Smyth said: “It was a wonderful sight seeing the fleet going through the Straits of Messina in the bright moonlight. We stood well out to sea and at Salerno. I only saw German aircraft once, and they disappeared as soon as they sighted our fighter cover from the Illustrious and Indomitable.”