TRUCKS AND DRIVERS IN THE DESERT WAR

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27368, 5 June 1954, Page 3

TRUCKS AND DRIVERS IN THE DESERT WAR

[Reviewed by LJi.H.)

Ml. The Official History of the 4th j ind 6th Reserve Mechanical Trans- t Ert Companies, 2nd N.Z.E.F. By < n Henderson. 378 pp. War His- t tery Branch. £any a solid New Zealand citizen \ psulting a road map on a Sunday c grnoon drive to see if he is on the < road for Swannanoa, blaming the g £ of roadsigns at some crossroads I j despairing of his navigational skill f juld be considerably heartened by a( jing this history of New Zealand 1 ack-drivers in the last war. I The first members of the Reserve J echanical Transport Company to i ad in Egypt totalled 380. -lardly a f an had handled a heavy truck in ' 5 life. In one section of 90 men only 1 iree had driven heavy transport i •hides in New Zealand, and only 30 f td car licences. Almost two-thirds of * •e men had never driven a car. A • months later those novices were < riving heavy trucks all over the road- i ss desert, finding their way to lonely * •its by the light of the stars, keep- 1 g up supplies to a huge desert army. < their trucks in smooth run- 1 pg order, doing their own repairs - id maintenance with the aplomb of • .grade mechanics, and generally setDg the tone for what was to become ■ se of the most self-reliant (and most ’ Bcient) units of an army of self- ' gant men. This well-written, sometimes breezy ' nd .sometimes grim, story of the men ! the two Reserve Mechanical Transit Companies will carry a note of ] ostalgia for many former Army J ivers. Trucks were more than fourheeled vehicles useful for carting ores. They were a home-away-from- ; ome, a portable kitchen and pantry nd comfortable sleeping quarters as ell. Drivers in a hurry could cook I breakfasts while they drove at : , with tins of rations tucked in on the exhaust manifold; tired [ht, they could read in bed with a de lamp worked from the truck ■y. (Truck batteries hardly ever [own because most night driving lone without headlights, a nerveig job which developed eyesight i cat’s.) a looked after their trucks, partly self-preservation, since the desert place to be lost in with a brokentruck, and partly from a sense lit pride. New Zealanders soon tetablished a name for keeping trucks taming longer and more smoothly than those of every other unit, and the Jesuit was that in spite of colossal pileages, trucks ran for an unbelievable number of months without crackfag up. And when things did go fcrcng, they managed somehow. The Ftory is told in this book of one R.M.T. 8 the drop-arm of whose steerke in the desert. He put his inner in creeper gear, wedged ae accelerator with a stick and alongside the front wheels them straight when they to bump off course. your initiative, driver,” was :tqvord of the authorities when went wrong, and the tales of elf-reliance of R.M.T. drivers passed into the folklore of the 2nd N.Z.E.F. falong with a number of other unprintable stories of individual drivers •nd their eccentricities). Drivers had i far better chance than other units to develop their individuality. They bad efficient of course, but cost of the Ine they were on their Ewn. and thljl developed accordingly. : The lessons learned in the first days fa the Western Desert in 1940 were invaluable when the R.M.T. and its' tobering three-tonners moved to preece. It was a different kind of wr, and a harder one. The German ar force made it impossible much of the time to drive during the day, so 'without lights, over unfamiliar roads) &ey drove at night. In the day time pen they tried to rest, the noise of Ebe air war, with the constant bomb3ig and machine-gunning by the Germnas made sleep impossible. Mermans made sleep impossible, as evacuation, carrying infantrymen pack to the ports, were a nightmare. £he evacuation itself was even worse. Jhe Workshops Section was to go Eboard the crowded Hellas, a Greek Boyal yacht. Once aboard, five Stukas packed; and the ship was an inferno d fire and death. A very grim epippe of war was relieved only by the teurage of those who carried out reswork among the wounded. The pthful trucks that had carried the drivers and their loads of infantrymen pad to be destroyed. There was no for them on the boats leaving |lt followed that on Crete the R.M.T Jen were drivers without vehicles, feany of them without proper clothing, pd sorted into a composite battalion pi reserve infantrymen (in which some pf their colleagues were artillerymen Jfiose guns were also left behind in fireece). Crete was another nightmare, But ffie men of the R.M.T. came out it with heads held high (except for those who would never lift their heads SSra srs? fOr tbose otbers who were | Back in Egypt again the R.M.T. was starting again from *®atch. And then, fully mobile for the first time, with 16 or 20 infantrymen’to each truck, the division rolled I® again into battle—more than 2800 [Vehicles travelling not on roads, but over the ever-changing desert, up and down wadis, always

at night always in the dark, and with the light-fuses removed so that noone even if he were foolish enough could break the black-out.

And then came Sidi Rezegh, which was hell for the infantry, and chaos, confusionand danger for the drivers oi the R.M.T., who sometimes had the job of bringing back wounded with fire everywhere and a fluid battlefront, and with the prospect at any time of driving a three-tonner into an enemy post. . O n S e tbe dri vers' of six R.M.T. loaded with captured prisoners were having breakfast when a German armoured squadron loomed up. The truck drivers dashed' frantically for their vehicles to get away—the “Tewfik Flying Stakes” the race was known as afterwards—and the convoy escaped.

And later still came the famous break-through at Minqar Qaim, with everything that ran on wheels commandeered to carry troops "out to safety after the infantry had cleared a gap in the enemy lines. This history says of the action: “The large number of men and vehicles rescued from Minqar : Qaim told a proud story of calm, intelligent, faithful drivers in a night of [complete chaos.” The word “proud” [is well justified, for if ever the 2nd iN.Z.&F. could be proud of its selfreliant truck drivers it was that night. One of the passengers in a bumping, lurching caravan was General Freyberg, wounded in the neck and being : evacuated for hospital treatment. The | General had become very annoyed during the break-through. Driven at breakneck speed, the caravan had lurched and swayed so much that it completely prevented him from firing his revolver out through the window! And so the story went on—Alamein (flies, casualties, danger), victory at Alamein, and the faithful three-ton-ners were on. their way to Tripoli. Finally, there was the Italian campaign. Henderson devotes only a comparatively small section of the book to the work of the drivers in Italy, and rightly so, because it was a different war there. Where there had been fluid movement in the desert with the three-tonner drivers often in the midst I of the fighting, in Italy it was a war of infantrymen from more or less fixed positions and the three-tonners were back to the orthodox work of transport drivers—and driving on roads at that, not making their own way over a trackless desert. Much of the time was spent in carrying riflemen to and from the front. Winter was a terrific strain on ingenuity and endurance. Carting supplies to some areas was a formidable task. There was the famous jeep train run from Forli to the front, just a few miles, which sometimes took 12 hours in the bitter winter cold. In one convoy of 26 jeeps one night, two crashed over a bank, six trailers had to be dumped, three jeeps burned out clutches, and every now and then men jumped into icy ditches for shelter from heavy shelling and mortaring. But 16 jeeps got through, taking supplies over tracks which were impossible for ordinary transport. Such nights will never be forgotten. “R.M.T.” is a first-cISSs addition to the growing shelf of unit war histories. It is well printed, splendidly indexed, and the pictures are well chosen. Henderson, who knows his army Jike few men, was an excellent choice for the authorship of what should prove a popular book.