ATTACK BY NIGHT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 303, 23 December 1939, Page 5

ATTACK BY NIGHT.

PORT OF AUCKLAND.

REALISTIC MANOEUVRES.

WAVY, ARMY, AIR FORCE.

An aeroplane engine droned in the far distance. Searchlight pencils frantically criss-crossed the sky. Suddenly a tiny dot in the distance became transformed from a thing of sound only to a tiny silvern moth. The lights had found their quarry. A mock attack on harbour objectives from the air last night had been foiled. About the same time guns spoke out across the harbour from emplacements. Other searchlights had found an enemy motor boat, and the guns were making sure. Auckland had been saved from a simultaneous attack from the sea. Many people in the city last night must have wondered what all this gunfire and all this searchlight work was about. The three services, Navy, Army and Air Force, combined to carry out an exercise to test tlie defence of certain objectives in the harbour. The port was closed for the period, knd the naval base was blacked out. From the sea, two unlightcd motor boats, representing enemy craft seeking to penetrate the inner harbour, tried to pass the defences. Their course was unknown either to gun or searchlight crews. From the air two kinds of aircraft were to undertake high level and dive-l>onibing of the same objectives, at the same time avoiding the searchlights. Realistic Attack.

The "attack" was timed to start at 8.30 p.m., and those watching had a deep sense of the realistic. Uniformed figures, officers and men, were simply shadows. Orders and information seemed to come from nowhere. Then across the moonlit and starry sky'~would burst a great flood of light, effective for many thousands of feet into the air. Other lights would pick up out at sea a little moving dot—the enemy craft. Then the guns would speak with their muffled voice. At headquarters telephones would convey information in a few terse sentences.su It was amazing to see the way tlie searchlights held their quarry once they found it. The hurried movement across the sky would calm down to a steady concentration of light. Nothing the aeroplane could do served to avoid the brilliance. Dive, twist, bank and turn as the pilot would, the lights held him. Once one light had round the mark the others would converge and concentrate, until it seemed that the machine was pinned against the sky with long, bright swords. "The exercise satisfactorily fulfilled its objects," commenced Colonel* N. W. McD. Weir, officer commanding the Northern Military District, to-day.