ENEMY REPELLED

New Zealand Herald, Volume 81, Issue 24825, 23 February 1944, Page 6

ENEMY REPELLED

CLASH ON NEW FRONT NEW ZEALANDERS' ACTION (N.Z.E.P. Official War Correspondent) ITALY, Feb. 8 Grenades bursting across brittle frozen earth and bursts of machine-gun fire splattered about the walls of an old farmhouse, began the first episode of close fighting the Now Zealanders had on the Fifth Army front in Central Italy. It happened in bitterly cold darkness, only a few hours after the New Zealanders occupied the trenches in their sector on this front among the jumble of peaks and hills between the Apennines and the sea. Anxious to know what changes had been made in this important sector ot the front, and what new forces had joined the line, the Germans sent out toward our lines a strong fighting patrol with orders to take at least two prisoners. They were heavily armed, anu had sappers to clear tracks through the minefields. The Germans came on the farmhouse, which was the forward headquarters of some Auckland infantry. Overpowering the sentry, the Germans surrounded the little stone house and shouted to its occupants: "Come out or be killed." The reply was a shower of bullets from the windows and doors. • _ For a few furious minutes, this small piece of the front became violently alive. The New Zealanders kept up machine-gun fire and hurled grenade? into the darkness until, realising they could not make headway, the German patrol began to withdraw. The Aucklanders went after them. As one New Zealand sergeant rushed [out of the doorway, n German hand grenade landed at liif feet. All he could do was to kick it aside, but his action was enough to save his own life and those of the others behind him. A second or two later the grenade exploded. wounding the sergeant slightly. Another New Zealander shot the tommv-gun from the hands of a German a few' feet from him. Leaving two prisoners, one of them ! severely wounded, the German patrol made off. One of the prisoners was an Austrian who had served 22 months on I the- Russian front. He was a sapper from a unit of a famous German division destroyed at Stalingrad. All the rest of the patrol were infantry of the loth Panzer Grenadier Division. As well as being their first infantry action with the Fifth Army, this little battle was the first time the New Zealanders had met Germans of this reorganised unit of their old enemy, the Afrika Korps.