RESCUE NET

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 123, 26 May 1945, Page 8

RESCUE NET

MISSING PRISONERS

(Official War Correspondent.)

AUSTRIA, May 20,

Every day small parties of Allied officers are out scouring the countryside of Austria for ex-prisoners of war who have not been able to contact the Allied authorities.

As a member of one such party I went yesterday into Russian-occupied Yugoslavia. We were the first British troops to pass through some 50 miles of partisan-controlled Austria and Yugoslavia, and the first to enter the city of Marburg, which is well within the Russian zone. Another New Zealander with the party was SergeantMajor J. A. Murphy, Wellington, who is a released prisoner of war. As we went up the Graz road we saw stragglers from the German armies still trudging wearily towards the concentration camps. Our road, which ran parallel with the Drau River, passed discarded arms and the wreckage of vehicles, the bloated bodies of horses, and heavy road-blocks which had been opened. Partisans wearing a red star saluted us as we passed,; though had we known it our position 1 was not as healthy as it appeared, as it was at about that time that FieldMarshal Alexander's statement concerning Marshal Tito's claims was being broadcast. We passed through Lavamund, with its vast electrical works, where a few days ago a handful of Australians and New Zealanders disarmed their former gaolers and took over the town. Then we began to overtake stragglers and supply columns of the retiring Bulgarian army, also partisans and Hungarian prisoners, all marching towards Marburg. We passed the strangest dump ever seen—miles of cast-off German uniforms and equipment lying as if it had been thrown down by men standing in lines. We were unable to find out what had become of the men whose clothes these were. RUSSIAN HELP. Marburg, a city of 75,00 inhabitants, is at least half devastated by Allied bombing. The Russian commander said he was proud, as commander of an outpost of the Russian Army, to meet an outpost of the British forces, and promised us every assistance in our search. This part of the country is administered by the partisans and he gave us a Russian escort to partisan headquarters, where we received unexpected co-operation. The success of the trip was assured when we found four ex-prisoners in the city, three of them New Zealanders. They were John E. Russell, Dunedin, of the 18th Battalion; Frank Tully Wairarapa, of the Divisional Signals; and Davis Roberton, North Auckland, of the 24th Battalion. All of them looked fit. They had been at liberty for eight weeks. They had kept under cover, listening to the English news with a crystal set Tully had made from a German telephone, till finally they met the partisans, who treated them 'well but watchfully. At no stage did we see any sign of friction with the Yugoslavs, and on the way back those we saw saluted us as they had on the trip to Marburg.