NAVAL OPERATIONS

Dominion, Volume 38, Issue 4, 29 September 1944, Page 4

NAVAL OPERATIONS

Varied Jobs Of N.Z. Men In a draft of naval personnel which recently returned to the Dominion on sick leave and furlough were men who have served in landing craft in the Sicily and Normandy landings, in aircraftcarriers in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea, in the Navy’s mosquito craft, the M.T.B.’s, and in warships in the convoy runs to Murmansk. Lieutenant J. Pointon, R.N.Z.N.V.R., who was in all the big Allied landings in command of large tank-landing craft, and commanded a flotilla of them in the Normandy attack, would say little of his experiences “for fear of being accused of shooting a line.” Another oflicer, who insisted on being anonymous, had been with Allied mosquito craft working from Corsica against the German sea supply line down the coast of Italy. The Germans, he says, thought the sea route safer for the transit of supplies to their troops fighting in the Rome area than the roads, which were under heavy air attack. The British motor torpedo-boats operated nightly against the 1900-ton Italian-built lighters the Germans used for the sea traffc and took heavy toll. One night as many us 11 of the Fdighters, which were usually armed with four 38mm. cannon, were sunk. Other naval personnel in the draft were from the Fleet Air Arm, and had seen operations on convoy work iu the Atlantic and in the attack on the Tirpitz in Alton Fiord, Norway, but all were imbued with the traditions of the “Silent Service” and refused to give any details of their experiences. One, however, an officer of the regular service, spoke of the cold and hour-in-hour-out duty of manning the guns of * cruiser on convoy runs from Britain and from Iceland to Murmansk, on which there were some “lively times.” He found Murmansk rather dull. It was within sound of the front-line guns, and the Germans bombed heavily whenever a convoy was unloading, so that considerable destruction had taken place in the town, and all but essential personnel had been evacuated. At the time he was there the Russian people and the British did not know each other so well as they do now, and there was a certain amount of suspicion due to the years of propaganda against each other which had gone before.