OUR BOYS ON FURLOUGH

Evening Star, Issue 24915, 13 July 1943, Page 5

OUR BOYS ON FURLOUGH

FINEST DIVISION OF FAMOUS EIGHTH ARMY NOTABLE MILESTONE OF WAR By ROBIN MILLER (Former Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F., Middle East.) Johnny New Zealand has come marching horiie again. Basking in the radiant fame of the finest, division of the great Eighth Army, he is almost a mythical figure, almost a demi-god—until you meet him. Then he is no longer a myth nor a demigod, but just . . . Johnny New Zealand. However older, wiser, and broader in his outlook the war may have made him, ho is basically the same old Johnny who went away.

After his years of active service on foreign soil, no moro gladdening sight ever lay before liis than that of his own homeland, growing green and real out of the haze ahead of the ship that brought him horn*. And yet deep in his heart he knows that this cannot* be his ultimate homecoming, that his place cannot be permanently at home until the war is won. In a month or two that hidden feeling will break through the all-too-transient froth of joyous reunion and forgetful celebration, and Johnny will bo impatient to rejoin " the boys " and the division. '■

For this interim home-coming there could not be a better time than the present. Britain's " retreat to victorv '' at last is ended; it was stopped at El Alnmein. The strange, confusing first three years of the war are over, the years of black .tragedy and frustration and disappointment, of battles against relentless time and hopeless odds, of retreat after retreat after retreat. Through those years there could be no question of a fighting man taking a prolonged holiday. There was a desperate urgency about it all .that rooted him to the spot. He was' like the little Dutch boy with his hand stopping the leak in the dyke, acutely aware that to desert his post would mean a tragedy far greater than the loss of his own life. The flush of victory could be the only, occasion for a home-coming holiday—not the hushed shadow of a military defeat, no matter how high a level of gallantry and selfsacrifice even a defeat might produce. AT LAST THE FLUSH OF VICTORY. Johnny New Zealand comes home in that flush of victory. The thrill of North Africa still echoes around the world. It is fresh and real in every mind as Britain's first decisive military success, and more than that as the turning pdint in the war, the vindication of one after another of those ugly days that went before it. And because of it New Zealand now can give her Johnny, without a twinge of conscience, the hero's welcome he deserves.

You remember, Johnny, when your wonderful division was born. The war. was brand new, and neither you nor anyone else really had the slightest idea of Avhat it had in store. But you felt your job on a farm, or in an office or a factory, suddenly fall flat. Without any conscious stimulus in the way of patriotism, duty, hate,' or flag-waving, you were drawn irresistibly towards the nearest recruiting office, and you knew that nothing short of flat feet or tuberculosis would'be able to stop you from thence on.

You and most of the others were citizens in uniform, with a sufficiently deep-rooted hangover from the independence of civilian days to cause your instructors a lot of headaches, "but as month after month went by you were steadily knocked into shape. You absorbed the foundation of your fine discipline on and off the field of battle; a happy medium between over-regi-mented troops, like machines with numbers, and what the sergeant-major used to call a something-something rabble. You were given credit for the initiative artd resourcefulness your life in a young country had bred in you; you learned a sense of responsibility, and understood it; you were helped by the shrewd selection and training of your junior officers, who had to be good—or else; and instead of being told, before you ever heard a shot fired, that you and your comrades were the best fighting men in the world, it was left to you to prove that later.

DESERT RATS, >

Before long you wore in Egypt learning to dig as you had never dug before. You dug and dug until the desert literally swallowed you up. You scavenged for bits of timber, iron, and scrim to build crude beds and shelves, made house-pots out of the beady-eyed chameleons, and learned how to take a bath in a mugful of water. You played football on the dry, heavy sand until your lungs felt as if they were bursting. You got your meals from a' ramshackle cookhouse called "'Joe's Joint," and ate them on the sand and with the sand.

You met the enemy—at a vertical .distance of about 16,000 ft, because he was only on Italian bomber nilot who flew so high in the night and aimed his bombs ,so badly you were sure he was more scared than you. Endlessly wondering when a real battle waa going to start, you pestered your 0.0. about it, and almost howled in your disappointment when all but a few of the i\ew Zealanders were left out of General Wavell's first round-up of Graziani and his wine-and-macaroni boys. Anybody could tell you were becoming a desert rat when yon went to .town and left a trail Of gritty dirtrimmed bath tubs. t You got a queer look in your eyes as' you tried to focus your thousand-yards stare down to the near sight of tho first white woman you seemed to have seen in years. You were- frightened of the traffic, and got homesick for the desert after about three days. By that time you'd had enough hot baths and steak and eggs to last you another six months. THEN THE REAL THING.

And suddenly you were in Greece, and the war was real and earnest. But not at first, because at first there were flowers and kisses and overwhelmingly joyous greetings from a magnificent people who hid all their bitterly-won understanding of the_ reality and earnestness of war behind that rapturous welcome. To-day and forever you will remember it all as the reflection of a nobility of soul, which would have inspired you to fight for the Greeks even if you had known what you and the rest of the world did not know tl, ei) —that the campaign in Greece was lost before ever it began. The historians, at any rate, say it was ail over as early as that; but you. Johnny, can recall some fraction of time between the start and the finish when everything seemed to happen at once. You remember how stupidly the Jerries got themselves killed in front of your Vickers' guns up there in the

snow near the Yugoslav border, and were biown to pieces by the 25pounders howling down the Olympus passes on to the plains south of the Aliakmen River. Sometimes the slaughter seemed sickeningly easy, and you were just hardening to the task when the rumour flew that the exhausted, illequipped Greek line on your left flank was caving in ; and that you would be trapped in those mountain passes if you did not get out at once. Under the cover of a dreary, misty night, you trudged out of the line. You were mud-

stained, damp, and tired, and your boots went slush, slush, along the sodden road. And you were a little puzzled, because you knew it wasn't you who had been beaten.

xN'ost day was sunny and fresh after the rain, but the weather was the oiny i;ood thing about it. The road was jammed with motor traffic streaming south to the new line at Thermopylae. Tlie sky was covered with Nazi bombers and fighters making a Hell's Corner out of every congested bend in the roud. You endlessly ducked for cover, and cursed and laughed, and lay on your back firing a rifle in futile anger. You saw dive-bombers pounce with a scream on an innocent village, and watched its shops and cottages go up in a geyser of smolce and rubble.

There was incredible news for you at Thermopylae. This was no mere withdrawal to a better line; this was evacuation. You were leaving Greece —if vou could, for you were the rearguard for the British Expeditionary Force. You knew how Leonidas and his Spartans must have felt on that same ground centuries before: about the same, no doubt, as Freyberg and his New Zealanders did now. But, with the empty shell cases mounting in brassy piles behind your smoking guns, you held the Nazis for more precious days, and then broke away to turn and fight ngnln and again, until at last you fought with your back to the sea, wondering: "Will the Navy come tonight? " It came, and you blessed its roval heart. THE SKY OVER CRETE. You stared iu breathless wonder at incredible, fantastic things that happened in the sky over Crete—things unreal against that lazy, sunny, emerald isle, its olive and orange groves and sleepy whitewashed villages basking in the spring sunshine, its high, snowstreaked mountains blue in the morning haze. But in the flash of an eye it was fantasy no longer. The clusters of paratroops floating down from great Junkers transports stopped being part of a mad dream, stopped looking like confetti or toy balloons. They, turned into Germans, coming to kill or be killed. And you killed them, as if it was some new kind of sport. You rushed towards the billowing chutes, firing around trees and alond rows of grape vines. If it Was to be men against men, ybu thought, it Iddkdd as if you would be able to handle them. But you learned that it was not to be just

men against men, but men against plartes, weary men armed with little else than the rifles in their hands, fighting under a sky black with the crosses of the Luftwaffe against an ever-rising flood of reinforcements from enemy bases less than an hour's flight away. You had to close your eyes to the bitter truth that no help could be sent you by air and little by sea; and open them only to the fight on your hands. Your whole world was what you could see in the sights of your rifle . . . kill, or be killed. VINDICATION IN LIBYA. By a miracle—and the miracle was mostly the stuff you and the (Royal Navy had in your hearts—you lived to know that Crete had cost Hitler a vital month's delay. In that time reinforcements reached the Middle East, the German-inspired revolt in Iraq was quelled, Syria occupied, and Cynrus fortified, and the Russian venture postponed a month in that'.critical year when the Germans were to l-each the gates of Moscow. With spirits never higher you rode gaily to do battle with (Rommel over the Libyan border in the winter of '4l. The friendly planes roaring overhead and the friendly tanks around you made you feel that for the first time you were meeting the enemy on something like equal terms. You smashed swiftly and boldly towards the relief of Tobruk. But hell was waiting to ho let loose across the ridges and plateaux of Sidi Rezegh and Belhamed. With one side struggling mercilessly to gain ; the other mercilessly to hold, you inched across those drab, colourless, battlegrounds, fighting through crisp days and cola moonlit nights for every yard of desert. You remember zero hour of a night attack with the bayonet. You feel the old familiar tenseness in stomach and mind. You are a black shape moving with steady, unhurried gait, and your boots 6wish over the widened camel scrub and crush the white shells of desert snails, Suddenly there is a shattering rattle of sound. Streaks of red chase one another through the night criss-crossing into a crazy, buzzing, Spitting web of fire. German machine gun nests are thick along the crest, and their fiery tracer is sweeping into the wadi. Drop like a stone, and make yourself as flat as one! But this is the moment when the tension breaks. A few cool words are spoken: "Are you right, lads? Let's go! " and you are quickly back on your feet. Like a grass fire fanned by the wind, a roar of man-made noise surges and swells, warm and stimulating to those who make it, chill and nerve shattering to thoso who listen. Yon yell the first wild shout that comes to your tongue. You clench the rifle with its dull bayonet forward, your feet quicken to a run. Flares grope frantically into the sky, and mortar bombs crash down. The German posts are reached and stormed with cold steel. Shots, shouts, and groans merge into the blood-curdling unroar. REST AFTER THE HARD WAY. That was tho way you won Sidi Rezegh arid fought through to Tobruk. But there came a day when your line had worn terribly thin, when promised relief failed to arrive, when the black tanks rolling down the escarpment were all German tanks, and you had only what were left of your valiant 25pounders and anti-tank guns to help you stop them. Yet you fought so desperately well that, even though the enemy broke through arid closed the Tobrulk corridor, he himself was so exhausted that he soon withdrew—south and away from those lonely wastes of scrub and brown earth, where the shallow dugouts were littered with clothing and ammunition and smashed weapons, and rifles stuck in the ground at their bayonet points were left to tell whoever might pass that way that there, and there, and there, a man had died for his cause.

You might say, Johnny, that that moment marked the end of your schooling in the art of war. While you and the whole British

Army were growing up, there had to be mistakes, and there had to be tragedies. Yet every blunder had held its lesson, every, tragedy its toughening tonic. It was a hard school, but the only one. From then onwards, you never looked back. You threw yourself across Rommel's path at Minqar Claim, cut yourself out of his grip, stopped him at El Alamein, and turned him there, and fought all the way back to Tunisia. Yes, Johnny, you came up the hard way. But you won the last battle. And you every moment of the honourable homecoming your country is impatient to give you.