THE LIBYAN ADVANCE

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LXII, Issue 17, 4 March 1941, Page 1

THE LIBYAN ADVANCE

WORK OF NEW ZEALANDERS

CAPTURED ITALIAN

TRANSPORT

(From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F. in the Middle East).

EGYPT, February 6. Big, snub-nosed diesel lorries, some of them with the word "Wop" and a serial number painted over a Fascist coat-of-arms on the cab, rumbled into the main New Zealand camp one morning this week as part of a column of dusty truckloads of dustier men.

The convoy brought back more New Zealanders—an army troops company of the Engineers—from "mopping-up" operations in the Western Desert and Libya. The Italian lorries were an infinitely small portion of the magnificent prize, in the form of captured war material, won by the British forces in their drive against the enemy.

Part of the company's work in the desert was to recover Italian vehicles from the silent, deserted camps in which they lay abandoned, and to put as many of them as possible on the road. Its total "bag" was approximately 400 —still only a small part of tiie huge fleets of road-worthy machines which the Italians left behind. Today scores of them are seen on western roads and tracks, again carrying supplies and materials of war, but now in the opposite direction.

Almost every kind of work that a swiftly moving advance might be expected to leave in its trail fell to these and other engineers detached temporarily from the "main body" of the New Zealand force. They have manned water barges and supply points, worked on wharves, carted loads of land mines out of harm's way, established recovery depots and levelled aerodromes along hundreds of miles of the coastal belt.

Two sappers led ,a nomadic life driving a road grader somewhere in Libya. They found a mobile home in the form of a trailer which the Italians had apparently used for the transportation of horses, and, hitching it to. the grader, they turned it into a combined sleeping, eating and store quarters. They wandered contentedly wherever there w;ere roads to be repaired, and got almost as far as Derna, hot on th;e heels of the fighting troops.