TOWN DESTROYED

Waikato Times, Volume 128, Issue 21361, 4 March 1941, Page 6

TOWN DESTROYED

FURTHER SUFFERING ! I EARTHQUAKE IN GREECE ITALIANS BOMB RESCUERS ' I (United Press Assn. —EJec. Tel. Copyright) (Received March 4, 3.15 p.m.) LONDON, March 3 i The Italian Air Force seized the : opportunity to add to the tribulation ! at Larissa, which suffered severely ; from an earthquake, by dropping | bombs, thereby interrupting rescue I work and causing further suffering ito a great number of civilians who ! were without shelter, according to Athens press messages. | The bombing attack was preceded by a reconnaissance flight and clearly was a deliberate attempt to take advantage of the catastrophe which had overtaken the town. 1 Reports state that Larissa has been completely destroyed by the earthquake. Half the houses are i'n ruins and the other half are not habitable. FIGHTING IN LIBYA NEW ZEALANDERS’ JOBS SALVAGING WAR MATERIAL (From tile Official War Correspondent all.lulled to mo New Zealand r'orces in liie .Middle Cast.* EGYPT, Feb. 6 Large, snub-nosed Diesel lorries, some of them with the word “Wop” and a serial number painted over a Fascist coat-oi'-arms on the cab, rumbled into the main New Zealand camp one morning this week as part of a column of truckloads of dustier men./ The convoy brought back more New Zealanders—an army troops company of the Engineers—from “mopping-up” operations in the Western Desert and Libya. The Italian lorries were an infinitely small portion of the magnificent prize of captured war material won by the British forces in their drive against the enemy. Part of the company’s work in the desert was to recover Italian vehicles from the silent deserted camps in which they lay abandoned, and to put as many of them as possible on the road. Its total “bag” was approximately 400—still only a small part of the huge fleets of road-worthy machines which the Italians left behind. Today scores of them are seen on western roads and tracks, again carrying supplies and materials of war, but now in the opposite direction. All Kinds of Jobs Almost every kind of work that a swiftly-moving advance might be expected to leave in its trail fell to these and other engineers detached temporarily from the “main body” of the New Zealand force. They have manned water barges and supply points, worked on wharves, carted loads of land mines out of harm’s way, established recovery depots and levelled aerodromes along hundreds of miles of the coastal belt. Two sappers led a nomadic life driving a road grader somewhere in Libya. They found a mobile home in the form of a trailer which the Italians had apparently used for the transportation of horses, and, hitching it to the grader, they turned it into combined sleeping, eating and store quarters. They wandered contentedly wherever there were roads to be repaired, and got almost as far as Derna, hot on the heels of the fighting troops.