BRIGADE COMMAND RELINQUISHED

Camp News, Volume 2, Issue 88, 5 September 1941, Page 3

BRIGADE COMMAND RELINQUISHED

Major-General Puttick

FAREWELL ADDRESS TO TROOPS

(From the Official War Correspondent with the" Second N.Z.E.F.)

CAIRO, August 7. Events which were milestones in

the history of the oldest infantry brigade in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force were recalled yesterday by Major-General , Puttick when he relinquished the command of the brigade. •

Addressing the troops at a cere menial parade, the major-general 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 said, “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 realize. “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.” Past Experiences. Major-General Puttick 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 theii destination looking “a bedraggled lo' 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 bring them all to-a state of toughness.

“You had to keep on working, and you worked exceedingly well, till 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.”

. Non-Swimmers Penalized.

Major-General Puttick recollected water-crossing 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 weekend leave stopped. The result was that the proportion of non-swimmers in the brigade had been . reduced to 10 pe» cent.

“And then came the campaign in Greece. You passed through the country rapidly, but you did some won derful work. This brigade was a very easy one to handle from my point of view — but it didn’t appear to the Germans to be so easy. Then followed the grim adventure of Crete, where yon 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 today that your ef forts were well worth while. I don’t want you to think that is a mere sop to your vanity or to any mistakes there may have been. You stopped the en emy’s parachute troops stone dead. You taught the German infantry that they will have to learn how to fight, and not simply walk through after their tanks and aeroplanes have paved the way like a steamroller.”

Wishing the brigade-success in the future, Major-General Puttick said ho would follow its career with the utmost interest.