"TALK ABOUT GRIT..."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 142, 13 March 1942, Page 10

"TALK ABOUT GRIT..."

Returned War Correspondents Impressions _ Of The Anzacs

ROM reporter on an Auckland daily newspaper to motor-cycle despatch rider with the N.Z.E.F. to official war correspondent is the story of Robin Miller, who arrived recently from the Middle East. He was sent back from the front line in Libya with an acutely painful appendix, patched up at a base hospital, and returned to New Zealand. for a further operation. After that, he hopes, he will be transferred to the Middle East again. "It was a real anti-climax," he observed. "There I was with a ringside seat at some of the most spectacular fighting, and I’m so groggy I hardly know what is going on. They put me into an ambulance, but it was 40 hours before I got to base. Forty hours in an ambulance is no picnic, believe me. It was peritonitis, and all they could do was get me into good enough shape to send home." Things Happened Fast The, story of the action, which took place up by the Tobruk Corridor, has been told in some detail, both by Miller and other correspondents. His personal recollections are hazy, he admits; not only was he in low physical condition but things were happening fast. He was attached to a brigade headquarters. Two New Zealand brigades had had a bad time, and were waiting for reinforcements, holding on desperately while German tanks cut through them viciously. Just before sunrise one morning came orders to prepare to fight, and action was not long in coming. From a slit trench in a forward position Miller watched it just as if he were at manoeuvres, though he was sufficiently close to appreciate its reality. An order to move came, and Miller, in a captured German car with a flat tyre which aggravated every painful bump and jolt, was tailing up headquarters. Then the leading vehicles suddenly turned, and he realised the reason when machine-gun bullets came zipping into the car. He, too, lost no time in turning. It was shortly afterward that his angry appendix made him give up. Realistic Broadcast Miller has been heard from the YA stations in talks recorded in the Middle East by the NBS unit. But for the fact that the ship carrying the recordings went down, New Zealand listeners might have heard him giving a talk with one of the most realistic noise backgrounds yet recorded in the war in the Middle East. He was waiting to go forward nearer the front, ' and was perched in the back of the sound truck talking away when the war came uncomfortably, perilously close. The record, when played back, had complete sound effects. A quiet, unemotional young man, Miller is hard put to it to express his admiration for the rank and file of the

New Zealand troops with whom’ he has been in some of the toughest spots of the Greece, Crete and Libya campaigns. "You’d never believe what they stand up to," he says. "Talk about grit...."

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