THE FIRST BAG

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 89, 11 October 1941, Page 11

THE FIRST BAG

N.Z.A.A. BATTERY

A JUNKERS BOMBER

(Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.)

CAIRO, October 9.

Something far better than the pride of a duck-shooter at the first bag of the season bubbled across a feast of curried prawns in a Mediterranean port the other day. The score of lads treating themselves to this unusual delicacy were celebrating the "opening bag," but the game was a Junkers bomber, the first victim to fall before the quick-firing guns.of the New Zealand Light Anti-aircraft Regiment. Delight and surprise at their success still lingered—surprise because in the whole hour of hectic action the only hits they could be sure of were on a number of parachute flares, and there was no sign in the darkness to tell of the bomber that veered away frorh the seaport, limped for miles along the coast, and then crashed. But experts \ooked at the shell-holes in the wreckage and found that three New Zealand | guns were the only weapons of their type in action that night, and officially awarded the credit to the New Zealand I crews. They also started two other planes on the road to destruction, and although British night-fighters finally ! brought these to earth, both the enemy [pilots declared that their machines had been partially damaged by the distinctive flak which was being sent up by (the New Zealanders.

The regiment is the youngest artillery unit in the N.Z.E.F., and the guns belonged to the junior troop, It was the crews' first real taste of action. Observers said that they stood up to it extremely well. This operation occurred during a turn of duty on the Suez Canal defences by the whole regiment, whose Dunedin lieutenantcolonel had two English1 batteries also under his command. His guns were in position as part of a chain of posts which greets enemy raiders with a formidable curtain of fire. The crews Df the successful troops hurried to action stations and almost immediately the bigger guns around them flashed and thundered as they threw up a high and heavy barrage. Bombers were droning in from the sea. They dived under the flashes of the high barrage to drop flares and begin bombing. Then the staccato thump-thump-thump of the New Zealand quick-firers, broke into the ear-splitting medley of sound. The air was so noisy and so much shaken, said an officer, that once it blew his tin hat off. Strings of tracer shells curled into the sky, shrapnel pattered down like iron rain- 1 squalls, and bombs crashed. The three New Zealand guns were so busy that their ammunition had to be replenished duringx the operation. This meant an eerie trip of a mile through deserted streets by an officer and a driver in a truck laden with explosives.

"It was too dark to see anything," ffunners said afterwards. "But the planes dived under the heavy barrage and cam's down among our stuff, and we were lucky enough to get at least one of them." So the night's work called for curried prawns ,a"t least.