BARE STEEL

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 137, 12 June 1941, Page 6

BARE STEEL

NAZIS FELL BACK

N.Z. TROOPS LAUDED

MAGNIFICENT ENDURANCE

(Prom the Official War Correspondent with N.Z.E.F.)

CAIRO, June 10

Out of all the lessons so bitterly learned in the Balkan campaigns emerges the shining fact of the worth of our fighting men. Even before Crete New Zealand had shown that she had given the British cause in this war a force whose proved and potential capabilities were nowhere surpassed. Then a clear week of fierce fighting in Crete, without talk of evacuation, set the New Zealanders their full and final test, through which they passed with flying colours. A more difficult and more hazardous military operation than that carried out by the New Zealanders in covering the withdrawal through Greece could not at that time be imagined. I believe they gained a victory no less than if they, had been ordered to advance instead of withdraw. As much a distinct military task as a counter-attack was the role they were given in delaying an enemy force several time's larger at fixed points along most of the 500-mile evacuation route while the remaining British troops fell back to the beaches and embarked. Not only did they fulfil their part to the letter but, in addition inflicted casualties which made their own seem negligible and at the same time escaped as a force still intact and ready to fight again. Endurance and Discipline That series of covering operations, carried out coolly and systematically under the ceaseless pressure of time and before the gathering weight of enemy forces may well be regarded in the light of a New Zealand victory. Only in a few sidelights did the New Zealand operations in Greece hold anything of the aura of spectacular unorthodoxy with which the name Anzac is apt to be associated by people who do not know these men. The main thread of the story of the campaign as I saw it was the sequence of tense hours and days in which coolness, endurance, discipline and high morale combined to form a barrier which enemy violence and weight of numbers could not break. These qualities, which were proved over and over throughout the withdrawal, were brought to light in the first days of the action. I remember an Austrian prisoner— one of 150 taken by Wellington infantry men—telling me that they expected to walk with comparative ease through the opposing. line after the Luftwaffe had paved the way with intensive bombing and strafing designed for its moral as well as its physical, damage. There was no need to tell him that method would not wash there. At that time, guided by "Deadeye Dick," as the men nicknamed the reconnaissance plane which droned above us for two days, German artijlery and divebombers were showering our infantry and gun positions with high explosives. The New Zealanders took that hellfire magnificently, and paid it back more than fully with our own artillery and infantry action. The promise of splendid things to come lay in the fact that from the nightmarish withdrawal journeys through Greece our brigades emerged unbroken and able to turn and fight again and again until the last stand was made with their backs to the sea. The Crete campaign overshadows Greece as the sternest testing ground for human endurance. There our men on the ground fought not only the enemy on the ground, but also the enemy in the air. While Britain saw a lull in the air war. which may have been significant, the sky over Crete was filled from dawn to dark with the black crosses of the Luftwaffe insignia.

With numbers and violence that grew rather than diminished, they dropped down to roads, villages and groves in endless low-flying swarms, always within a few minutes call of their ground forces, and constantly seeking to immobilise and unnerve their opposition. Our men had to fipht them, and not with guns, but with sheer, stoical endurance. "What I thought most remarkable about the battle for Crete was the extreme contrast it presented between the ultra-modern, almost supernatural, methods the Germans employed to gain a footing there and the old style of hand-to-hand fighting with which the New Zealanders so successfully engaged them. Armchair tacticians who in the past few years have done their best to bury Ihe bayonet as an outdated infantrv weapon would have been amazed at the continual use of bare stecL Could Xot Face It "The Germans showed time after time that they simply could not face it, although it was often noticed that they were quick to reform and renew heavy automatic fire after being scattered by bayonet charges. The psychological effect was undeniable and, more than that, many casualties were inflicted. "The second noteworthy feature was the fine conduct of troops untrained as infantrymen, but plunged into battles no less fierce than those of regular riflemen. Clerks, signallers, drivers, technicians ana all* the rest of those specialists who in normal warfare may never fire a shot, lay out in forward posts and took part, in patrol work and even bayonet charges—some of them without bayonets. For the most part they had been formed into rifle companies before the invasion began but many afterwards turned riflemen voluntarily or through neces,Jli le V *} [ke these had alreadv pioved their worth in their own jobs, particularly in Greece where drivers, apart from doing outstanding routine work on long supplv ro - u u e f' vital parts in the withdrawal of front line troopV Engineers built bridges and miles of fn ?nf,rh n UP Qgain - Oftt '" in touch-and-go circumstances, and signallers maintained communicaan°d S SS? r difficultie ? of bombing and shell fire and frequently changing troop locations. Now "ike cavalrymen and artillerymen who also took up rifles, they won' frV< h laurels in an unexpected way No praise however, is too" hi"], for the regular mfantrvmon Maori and pakeha alike. All in Crete shared the strain of constant nir attacks but our fighting men earned the tremendous burden of fatigue accumulated after sleeping serves b'Cl ■ .lull thai Uicj- arc milt