MOVE INTO ITALY
NEW ZEALAND DIVISION PRECEDED BY ARDUOUS TRAINING PREPARATION FOR FIGHTING IN HILL COUNTRY (Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.) CAIRO. It is now possible to tell some of the story of how the New Zealanders prepared to nlay their part in the liberation of the Continent and the final victory over Germany. Long before they knew they would join the Allied armies in the campaign for Italy, the New Zealanders were preparing to change their veteran mobile desert division to an even more powerful striking force fort close hillcountry fighting, and the battle training was the longest and .hardest the New Zealand troops in the Middle East had ever experienced. While the Eighth Army was invading Sicily] the New Zealanders were making long forced marches and training in tanks and on guns and transport through the hot Egyptian summer. It was more than training, for into the New Zealanders’ • mobile infantry and artillery had to be fitted a new armoured formation, which had trained for 12 months to go into action as the first New Zealanders in their own heavy tanks. The training was completed with the biggest battle manoeuvres since the rehearsals for the attack on the El Alamein line. Out on a broken stretch of desert country the New Zealanders in giant Sherman tanks had their first trials of co-operative fighting with the guns and infantry. For the final battle exercise they marched at least 90 miles over one of the most barren stretches in western Egypt. They endeavoured to create conditions akin to those they will find in Europe. They moved the guns and trucks along narrow lanes. The engineers tried lifting booby-traps among high corn in a swamp on the edge of the Nile. The gunners prepared barrages to blast more German guns and mortars from the same type of hill positions they found the enemy holding in Tunisia. Meanwhile, the division’s administrative section undertook the enormous task of moving the entire fighting force and all its services to Europe.
While any reference to the size and numbers of the New Zealand force in Italy is forbidden it is impossible to give any idea of the magnitude of this administrative job, but perhaps a fair comparison would be the shifting by sea of. the entire population of one of New Zealand's larger provincial towns, with all its transport, medical, dental and food services, plus enormous quantities of war materials. Within a few weeks the whole of the arrangements were completed. Everyone was equipped with both summer and winter clothing, inoculations were given against typhoid, and to counter the effects of malaria mosquito bites each man before he reached Italy had taken several mepacrine tablets. These and countless other details were completed so smoothly and quickly that to most of the troops their transfer, which for some was to the eighth Mediterranean country they had visited, was just another “break.”
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAITA19431202.2.26
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1943, Page 3
Word count
Tapeke kupu
484MOVE INTO ITALY Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 December 1943, Page 3
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Wairarapa Times-Age. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.