ARNIM CARAVAN.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 64, Issue 30, 15 November 1943, Page 6

ARNIM CARAVAN.

TROPHY FOR INDIA. SCENE OF NAZI SURRENDER. Sheik Madar and Maskin Mohammed, two lean, battle-scarred Sepoys, stood on the ship’s iron deck guarding a decrepit-looking motor-coach. You wondered, as you looked at it, why anybody should mount guard on such a battered vehicle. Yet Sheik Madar and Maskin Mohammed were intensely proud. The reason for their pride became apparent when Sheik Madar stepped aside to reveal the gilded panel screwed to the motor-coach’s side. “General Qberst von Arnim’s Caravan, presented to India by the Fourth Indian Division,” it said. Sheik Madar and Maskin Mohammed were chosen to take home to India this great prize—the vehicle in which von Arnim, Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in North Africa, surrendered to the Fourth Indian Division north of Sainte Marie de Zit on May 12. A few hours before the caravan left here, I was taken aboard the ship which carried it to India, says a “Daily Mail” correspondent from Suez.

Sheik Madar and Maskin Mohammed shadowed me as I walked round the vehicle.

Then they served me a lunch of pilchards, bread and water at the table where von Arnim ate his meals in the field, and insisted on my occupying the chair in which the German commander sat to sign the surrender terms. All round me in the saloon of the caravan were small wooden panels inscribed in gilt and red indicating the positions which Allied and enemy generals took at the conference that finished the war in Tunisia. One recorded that LieutenantGeneral C. Allfrey, Commander of the Fifth British Corps, perched on the arm of a chair facing von Arnim across "the bare table. Best Available. Another showed that Major-Gen-eral F. S. Tuker, Commander of the Fourth Indian Division, sat in the corner of the settee. Between Allfrey and Tuker, Colonel Nolte, Chief of Staff to von Ainim, stood in the doorway leading to the sleeping chamber, which still contains the Ifazi Commander’s crude iron bedstead.

For a Commander-in-chiefs caravan this specially adapted Opel blitz coach is very tawdry.

The roof is lined inside with compressed cardboard, through which at some time an Allied bullet tore, to leave an eight-inch scar. One can hardly credit von Arnim with ordering anything so paltry in a mood of Spartan Prussianism, It was the best German workmanship could give him. He compensated for lack of personal comforts by ensuring that the caravan was fitted with a first-class engine. . That was until he reached Sainte Marie du Zit. Now the caravan, like von Arnim, has passed into captivity.