BEHIND THE LINES IN NORTH AFRICA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 198, 9 April 1943, Page 8

BEHIND THE LINES IN NORTH AFRICA

Why Events Have Dragged In: Tunisia

OST people have wondered why our armies in Tunisie have taken so long to. move. Perhaps they will cease wondering after they have

read this article

by

E. A.

MONTAGUE

from a recent issue of the

3 Manchester Guardian:

N the last few days, I have travelled by road to Algiers and back, a total distance of a thousand miles. My small Citroen, carrying three passengers and luggage, covered over half the distance at an average speed of nearly 38 miles an hour, including stops, and the remainder at about 32, crossing several mountain ranges on the way. There could not be a better testimony for the astonishing efficiency with which the Royal Engineers have carried out their immense tasks of maintaining our road communications. Roads here, like everything else from cars to plumbing, have been neglected since June, 1940. The First Army arrived to find that troops and supplies must be carried forward a distance of 500 miles over an inadequate road system, badly maintained. Choked ditches had to be cleared, for nothing undermines roads like faulty drainage. Bridges never designed for huge modern military vehicles had to be repaired or strengthened. Scores of miles of road surface had to be relaid. Bomb or shell craters had to be filled up. Much widening had to be done, for the roads were seldom big enough to take more

than two lines of traffic, and not always that. Bridges were almost always single-line-traffic width, and therefore many duplicate bridges and approaches were built. Elsewhere fords were constructed. In our November advance, bridges blown up by the enemy had to be répaired. Suits As Wages All sorts of subsidiary problems arose. Quarries had to be opened or reopened to supply the huge quantities of stone needed. Extra labour had to be found, and the use of Arab labour provided fresh headaches. Money wages were of little use to the Arabs, who had nothing to spend it on. What they needed was clothes, and cloth is almost unobtainable in this country. So arrangements

are now being made to provide Arab road labourers with dyed suits of battle dress. It is also necessary to find’ tents or other shelter for them and for French or British workers. The French Department of Bridges and Roads has given us all the help it could, but the main burden of all this has fallen on the sappers. Almost every mile of my journey provided evidence of how well they and their devoted collaborators the Pioneers have carried out their tasks. A remembered stretch of badly pitted road surface had been patched and rendered safe. Another had been entirely relaid. Narrow hairpin bends had been blunted and widened. Here a gang of Arabs’ worked under the supervision of a_ single

British corporal or private. There @ party of sappers worked with feverish haste to repair a weakened bridge so that the lines of army vehicles waiting each side to cross it should be delayed as little as possible. Sight for Sore Eyes The way these sappers and Pioneers attack an urgent job is a sight for sore eyes. They built one bridge over the River Medjerda, together with its two approach roads, in four days, and the N">djerda River bed is as wide as the Thames at Oxford. When we took Med-jez-el-Bab in November and the Germans blew up the bridge there our sappers put ima hundred-foot span which was capable of bearing any traffic in a few hours at night. | All this is only part of the sappers’ duties here. They also have to maintain the aerodromes and construct new ones. Everybody now knows how the lack of aerodromes close behind the front has made difficult the problem of close air support. The. chief trouble is unsuitability of the prevailing soil, which swells when wet and cracks when it dries. But the sappers are overcoming (Continued on next "page)

BEHIND THE LINES (Continued from previous page) the difficulty, and provision of new airtfields is now really under way, though it is useless to expect instantaneous results. Another standing job of the sappers is discovering and rendering harmless enemy mines and booby-traps, which they are using freely in certain sectors. Throughout this campaign, I have never heard a word of anything but warmest praise for the work of the Royal Engineers, without whom even the partial success so far achieved would have been impossible. Now that the danger is over, there is no harm in saying that some weeks ago, some of our troops in the Tunisian forward areas were down to their last day’s supply of rations and nearly "as low in ammunition. The result of our extremely {and unexpectedly rapid advance in the early stages was that, as a staff officer put it to me, "G, was three weeks ahead of Q." — meaning thet operations had outrun supply. It was considered policy to run that risk in the hope of taking Tunis in one rush, and history will show how nearly that rush succeeded. But it did not succeed, and our troops were left out in front with the supply services labouring to catch up with them. It was due to the most skilful and devoted efforts of all ancillary services that after a very few days the danger had disappeared and the troops had and still have ample supplies. Work of Police and Drivers At regular intervals all the way from here to Algiers, even in country so desolate that it reminded me of the Chilean nitrate desert, there are traffic control points and petrol dumps with’ notices at every point to tell drivers how far ahead the next one is. There are military police all along the route, and they have marked with notices every dangerous hill or bend for five hundred miles

-and there are plenty. Everything possible to make driving easy and safe has been done. In the early days of the campaign one convoy ‘of 300 vehicles, fifteen miles long, moved 380 miles in twenty-nine hours. In the forward areas they have often had to move through the might without lights. But the ammunition has continued to come up and so have the magnificent "compo" rations, which are surely the best ever supplied to any And Now the Signals ~ No account of the fine work done by the ancillary services is complete without a reference to the Signals. They found the ‘national system of communications in a state of utter neglect and the telephone system in any case inade-_ quate. In effect they have put a new national telephone service into North Africa. Their line sections have had to test every bit of the existing installations. For instance, they have had to replace many hundreds of cracked insulators which were letting in the rain and causing faults. They have set up over 400 miles of overhead wires and uncounted hundreds of miles of ground lines. The local French telephone and telegraph service has given whole-hearted and invaluable help, but no maintenance has bee: done for nearly three years, and the job is enormous. When a fault occurs the signallers have to go out perhaps over the mountains in rain and darkness to trace and correct it. ‘By sheer hard and continuous work they are gaining ground and improving telephone communications steadily. It is their pride that telegraphic and wireless communications have never failed throughout the campaign, but in the early stages staff officers hac to spend half their nights on motor-cycles riding through possible hostile country to find out what was happening in different parts of their sectors. Thanks to the indefatigable work of the Signals those nights are becoming rarer.