CHANGE FROM DESERT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 November 1943, Page 4

CHANGE FROM DESERT

NEW ZEALANDERS IN ITALY RECENT VISIT TO FORWARD POSITIONS. TRAFFIC OVER DAMAGED MOUNTAIN ROADS. (Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.) SOUTHERN ITALY, November 16. •‘We can see right into his backyard from here,” an officer said to me when, this afternoon, I called at a forward artillery headquarters of the troops battling through a rugged section of the Eighth Army’s front. “Yes, and he can see right into ours, too," remarked another officer. It was a position typical of the warfare in these parts. Only a day or two before, the Germans had occupied that same place. They were still moving back, but were leaving behind them a trail of wrecked bridges and blown-up roads. To reach the guns, I had travelled down a steep, winding road, narrowed in parts to one vehicle width by culverts. The edges were broken and treacherously soft. Supply trucks struggled to get their great bulk round hairpin bends which the enemy had i blown up at the sharpest point. An occasional shell lobbed down from tlje distant heights. At the foot of a hill the road stopped abruptly, where a bridge over a narrow but deep watercourse had been demolished. A wiretracked, temporary filling led to the other side. Not more than a quarter of a mile further on, the main arches of a great stone- and mortar bridge lay in the river bed, just a great heap of rubble. The road was the river bed itself, scored up to form a narrow causeway. The ascent was steep so steep that a truck and winch were stationed at the top to haul up anything that found the strain too great. Swinging up a road skirting a small village perched on a hilltop, and down to another bridge, traffic was strung, winding its tortuous way. “I would not loiter there,” an artilleryman said as he watched a truck baulk on a bridge as the gears were being changed. The enemy, I was laid, had been foiled in attempts to demolish the bridge by the action of a British sapper. The sapper had arrived on the scene when a fuse had burned to within a few inches of the charge. He whipped out, the fuse just in time. Since then the- Germans have done their utmost io destroy the bridge by bombing and shelling, but they have not hit "it and the traffic still rolls on. The shelling was not all one-sided. On a steep, sloping hillside were our guns, which blazed at targets which I could not see. It was strange warfare after the desert. Through villages, over hills and across rivers there seemed to bo a prospect of endless miles.