TANK MANOEUVRES

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 6 October 1942, Page 3

TANK MANOEUVRES

ARMOURED DIVISION AT WORK ACTIVE SERVICE CONDITIONS FOR AUSTRALIANS Somewhere in Australia, reports j Gavin Long. Defence correspondent of | the "Sydney Morning Herald," an Australian armoured division is deployed along a fifty-mile front, carrying out exercises that are the culmination of more than a year of planning and training. The armoured regiments are nearly fully equipped with American medium and light tanks. j The division is the most powerful | fighting machine Australia lias ever | had. It cost about £25,000,000 to equip ! the force; its base workshops alone cost £2,000.000. Recently a group of newspaper editors and correspondents stood on a low hill in the otherwise flat plain where the division is manoeuvring and watched a mock attack by armoured regiments and motorised infantry. Here was only part of the division, but, as the attack developed, tanks—tons of armoured rolled forward in open order through lighting vehicles, with many guns—the knee-high thistles and bindyeye. As the tanks came close enough to look like tanks instead of like distant herds of cattle on the open plain, and the explosions of a mock artillery bombardment began to roar on the little hill, two startled kangaroos hopped off the hill towards the advancing tanks wheeled and disappeared round the flank of the attacking liner DREAM COME TRUE This exercise, the largest so tar undertaken. was the climax of long months of work and planning towards the creation of the Australian overseas force which has been the dieam of the men of the A.l.F.—a self-contained Australian army with its own armour and its own supporting air force. As a token of the air force which will later work with the division, one aircraft dived at the advancing line of tanks and infantry. Like a German panzer division, this division has its own motorised infantry, as well as its own artillery, its engineers, and other services. The tanks include American General Grants, each with a 75-millimetre and a 37-millimetre gun. To those who watched the mock attack and the parade which followed, with each regiment drawn up in a loose formation and the crews in khaki drill batile-dress and khaki berets standing in front of the tanks, it was clear that, where tanks are concerned, American aid has been a good deal more than a trickle. When the exercises are over the division will have been out on the plains under active service conditions for ten weeks. Yesterday and last night the j men were probably on the move during i the day. living on hard rations, with i perhaps a hot meal brough up in hot boxes from the rear, sleeping beside their vehicles at night. Each man has three blankets and his greatcoat in the tank with him: each tank carries a few days’ emergency rations. EXPERIENCED LEADERS Sprinkled through the armoured division are leaders who. between them, have had experience in every one of the Middle East campaigns of last year. The general officer commanding led the fastmoving column which, with British tanks advancing along a parallel course farther south, cleared the western half of Cyrenaica in the first Libyan camTwo of the brigadiers commanded a mechanised cavalry regiment in Middle East campaigns. The senior staff offic- ! er served with a British armoured divij sion and in Greece. One A.I.F. cavalry j regiment which fought in the first | Libyan campaign and in Syria, using j machine-gun carriers and occasionally j light tanks, has contributed nineteen ' officers, including newly-promoted serI geants. to the division. This is about I two-thirds of the regiment’s normal strength in officers.’ j It would be hard to find an Austra- | lian division built of finer human ma- | terial than this one. The men were ! selected. Necessarily there is an unlI usually big proportion of skilled tradesmen in the ranks (although the division 'is wondering where replacements of I tradesmen and men capably of becoming expert drivers and 3 wireless operators and gunners are going to come from when they are needed). Officers and N.C.O.'s were given long training before the regiments were formed. Leaders consider that there is as much officer material in the ranks as there is in any division in the A.1.F., which is saying a great deal. A POPULAR UNIT Soldiers are not always popular in towns where they take their leave, but one brigade of the armoured division is proud of the fact that, after it had been camped for a few days near a coalmining town, the municipal council wrote to the brigade commander congratulating the brigade on the bearing, dress, and behaviour of the men on leave. The division appears to believe that war is a young man’s job. Five lieu-tenant-colonels. I was told, are under 33: most of the regimental commanders are in their thirties; the average age of majors is about 30. The men of the division are now rehearsing for war. Out in front of the tanks regiments are the division's armoured cars, which were to form a reconnaissance screen in case an imaginary Japanese army broke through 3 front on which it was being held a little farther north. On Saturday, however, the disconcerting news arrived at the headquarters of the brigades and regiments that fifth column cells had become active in the armoured car regiment and the entire unit had gone over to the enemy and was moving back to harass the division. The men in the armoured cars have seven days' rations and good supplies of petrol, and can be a troublesome enemy. Possibly the enemy regiment will attack the vital and complex supply organisation. which stretches back for more than 50 miles behind the fighting front. The units of this organisation are concealed in the paddocks on each side of the road leading to the front. VAST SUPPLY NEEDS At one place a sign will point to a Held ambulance, dispersed and camouflaged among trees. At another there may be a field workshop so hidden as to be invisible from the air, with over 100 skilled tradesmen, equipped with lorry-borne lathes and other machine tools, working hard all day on repairs and replacements for the regiments out in front. In two hours a field workshop can move, if it jettisons unfinished repair jobs. It is always a 48 hours' notice to move.with all its work done. Back along the division's lines of communications there are ordnance, engineer. medical units, petrol stores, a mobile bath, and a mobile laundry, and a multitude of services needed to feed and keep in working order a petroldriven mechanised fighting force, which talks not of miles to the gallon, but of gallons to the mile. "The division has whittled down its petrol consumption until it only uses 1.300 gallons to the mile.” said one commander. As well there are many thousands of men to be fed and kept healthy and reasonably clean. Army Service Corps units are needed to keep the division’s supplies iip to it. Unless this supply and maintenance organisation works smoothly and speedily the battle may be lost, because defects in this organisation mean that it is the enemy and not us who get there first with the most tanks. I