NEW ARMY CHIEF

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24696, 27 August 1941, Page 10

NEW ARMY CHIEF

FAREWELL TO BRIGADE GRIM ADVENTURES RECALLED HARD TRAINING DAYS (From the Official War Correspondent with the 2nd N.Z.E.F.) CAIRO, Aug. 7. Events which were milestones in ihe history of the oldest infantry brigade in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force were recalled yesterday by Brigadier Puttick, the newly-appointed Chief of the New Zealand General Staff, when he relinquished the command of the brigade. Addressing the troops at a ceremonial parade, the brigadier said that after having been associated with the brigade since its inception he was sorry to leave it. the more so because of the experiences they had been through in the past few months. . , “ I should like to remind you,” he declared, “ that you nO longer belong to an untried formation. You now have a tradition behind you; I think it is a very fine tradition, and you will find that it will help you to an extent which perhaps you do not realise. “I should like to thank those members of the first Expeditionary Force who in the period before Greece did their best to teach you what war meant, as far as it could be taught without the real test. You probably did take in some of the lessons which those experienced men were trying to teach.’’ ' ■

Recalled ' with Pride

The brigadier looked back on experiences, of which . some, he said, were remembered / with a ' certain amount of exasperation, but all were recalled with pride. He spoke of the early training days in' Egypt when the brigade was marching as many as 40 miles a week, and of one particular march of about 20 miles on a very hot day, when the men reached their destination looking “ a bedraggled lot of warriors.’’ Those exercises had taught them how to “ hang on ’’ however footsore, weary and thirsty they might be. After large-scale manoeuvres, their next important experience had been the digging in the Western Desert of “ a little trench ’’—a tank trap 15 feet wide and six feet deep Some of them had wondered why machinery could not be used instead of picks and shovels but the one purpose of the task had been to brine them all to a state of toughness. ‘‘You had to keep on working, and you •' worked exceedingly well, until that toughness was developed by all of you—the clerk, the shop assistant and the lawyer, as well as those of you who had done the kind of work before,” he added. “ You will -remember that the man who had had experience was an expert, and he showed you a lot of wrinkles that saved you from getting another sort of wrinkle on your hands.” . / _ The brigadier recollectcfl watercrossing exercises on the Nile, and told how he subsequently gave every man three weeks in which to learn to swim a length of the camp baths, on penalty of having his week-end leave stopped. The result was that the proportion of non-swimmers in the brigade had been reduced to 10 per cent. “Wonderful Work"

“And then came the campaign in Greece. Y6u passed through the country rapidly but you did some- wonderful work. This brigade was a very easy one to handle from my point of view—but it did not appear to the Germans to be so easy. Then followed the grim adventure of Crete where you were called upon* to face a type of attack which had not been experienced anywhere before. You stuck it out well and inflicted appalling casualties on the Germans. “It is quite clear to-day that your efforts were well worth'while. I do not want you to think that is a mere sop to your vanity or 4o any mistakes there may have been. You stopped the enemy’s parachute troops stone dead You taught the German infantry that they will have to learn how to fight, and not simplv walk through after their tanks and aeroplanes have paved the way like a steam roller.” Wishing the brigade success in th* future, the brigadier said he would follow its career with the utmost interest.