PATROL SCHOOL FORMED

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23847, 16 January 1943, Page 7

PATROL SCHOOL FORMED

NEW ZEALAND MEN ON STAFF

TRIPOLITANIA, January 14. Now Zealanders. Australians, and men of English and Scottish regiments arc “pooling” their experience in desert warfare to give advanced units of the Bth Army the widest knowledge of patrolling—an all important form of land reconnaissance. .

On the Gulf of Sirte our troops are seeing, hearing, and discussing in the first British patrol school all that has been learned about patrols in three years of war. Formed within a few days after we occupied this territory, the school, which consists of a group of trucks, bivouac tents, and cookhouse, is conducted by New Zealanders, and has a number of our men on its staff. Three of the 12 instructors are Australians, flown from Cairo to make available the unparalleled knowledge of desert patrolling they obtained during the Tobruk garrison’s stand. Obstacles such as patrols at Tobruk or the El Alamein line found—mines, trip-wites, booby traps, flares, even tanks—are set out on a stretch of sand which students are taught to cross and recross with information they went to obtain. They are mastering the technique of being able to advance on compass bearings hundreds of yards across featureless countryside without even the stars as a guide. Some of the Bth Army’s original “desert rats,” Englishmen who have been fighting in the desert for three years, arc teaching armoured and mobile patrolling, but most of the day periods are spent discussing results of night patrols and learning to overcome traps and mines. "Everything taught is based on practical experience,” one New Zealand instructor told me. “We have learned a lot and should show results in our next patrol work.”