RESTING NEAR BARDIA

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23799, 19 November 1942, Page 4

RESTING NEAR BARDIA

— o — OF N.Z. DIVISION (Official War Correspondent N.Z.E.F.) BARDIA, November 14. While our sappers and specialised units are clearing the border roads and helping to build supply routes into Libya, part of the New Zealand fighting force is .esting and reorganising on the coastal plateau a few miles from Bardia Since ffie short night battle in which Auckland infantrymen captured Halfaya Pass and opened the main traffic route up the coast, the New Zealanders have made no contact with the retreating enemy The defences which were the last Axis strongholds to surrender in the, last winter’s campaign have been occupied easily by our troops in the last three days. Not a shot was fired as our columns rolled past the pile-; of rubble that were Fort, Capuzzo. wh>-re some of the same troops foughc their first battle last November. Solium barracks, left hurriedly by the Gomans at the point of Maori bayonets last year, were just an undefended group of battered stone buildings this week. Along the roads were signs of the disorderly German retreat—overturned trucks and abandoned guns, sorm of them captured by the Germans from the Russians. Our guns r md transport have laagered between snell holes and trenches left in last wnter’s battle of Monastic, A few hundrea yards towards the coast is the track along which the New Zealanders captured by Rommel’s tanks were marcheo to Bardia. To-day many of the same men are swimming in Bardia harbour, some hundreds of feet below the ridge where they spent five weeks of captivity Groups of New Zealanders, some of them prisoners here last year and others who wire with the South Africans in the attacks which captured the town last January are walking about the broken white township with bath-, ing towels across their shoulders. The men have found the shallow dugouts where 700 of them spent many cold, hungry nigh ns Barclia ha; changed little since it was stormed oy Australian and British troops in tne first Libyan campaign. Buie on high cliffs, with the harbour below and on either side of the town, it suffered heavily from the British bomfarament from land, sea. and air. Only the skeletons of the Italians’ white colonial houses and ad. minislrative buildings remain after two years as a garrison town for British and Italian troops. Two days of unusually warm sunshine for November in Libya has given the New Zealanders a chance to swim, wash Egypt’s dust from their clothes, and clean their equipment. The guns that fired in (hu barrages that ended the Alamein Line are being cleaned and overhauled. Everyone y keen to move on. Last year the New Zealand battalions reached Tobruk and Gazala. This year’s “Novemoer Handicap” will take them, they arc hoeing, even further across North Africa