manoeuvres

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 3, 12 March 1945, Page 29

manoeuvres

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By 234949

Great things, manoeuvres. Hours of waiting, hours of driving in convoy, hours in the sun flat on the sweet-smelling grass. ' Assaulting strongpoints in force, strategic withdrawals, getting captured, going hungry when the travelling kitchen was lost, cutting loose in some one’s apple orchard —oh yes, manoeuvres were splendid when you look back, but how we detested them then ! After the scarcity of leave, the rigidity of discipline, and the inadequacy of pay, manoeuvres were the most obnoxious feature of Army life.

For one thing there was all the flapdoodle and solemnity before the jamboree came off. “Manoeuvres” — like the name of a disease — bandied from mouth to mouth in a whisper for wqeks beforehand. But none knew when or wherenone except the orderly-room wallahs, that is, and they maintained a discreet security silence. Maybe even they didn’t know, but wanted to pretend they did. Suspense like this might go on for weeks, months even, and then sometimes the whole scare would peter out with the vague commentary: “The

Brigadier’s been changed ; the new bloke isn’t keen on manoeuvres.” More often, however, the months of suspense would blow up in a sudden order to pack for a two weeks’ stunt. Platoon commanders would get mobile, and read out long catalogues of things to be taken and other things which were on no account to be taken. Specialists, like Sigs., Transport, and Vickers, had to hold a secretive and hasty autopsy on gear. Cooks had to brush the cobwebs from those cumbrous and sooty chariots, the portable kitchens. In something like half an hour after the intimation had been given, every jot of equipment had to bein trim and every man had to be outside his tent loaded down like a travelling bagman. That was organization for you. How we hated organization. Then followed the idle wait for the trucks. For some reason the transport section and the rest of us never synchronized. It seemed to me that they thought of themselves as the aristocracy of the Army and, as such, complied with aristocratic etiquette by always being late. When they did bump up to the

tents, a nonchalant hour after time, there was usually another dispute to be settled. Were we to carry our own valises or were they to be disposed of in the baggage truck ? In the absence of the platoon commander, we knew they were supposed to be in the baggage truck. What was a baggage truck for ? So hastily converting idea into action, we dumped our gear ■on the spot. Only when it was all stowed away (rifles underneath) did the platoon commander catch up with our dexterity. “ Get that stuff out of there. What do you think this stunt is, a school picnic ? ” Reluctant, injured, rebellious, we saddled ourselves once more. Total war, that’s what it was total war.

Trucks in those days were civilian vehicles which had been commandeered. You might travel in anything from an ice-cream van to a sheep-wagon. We climbed in and sat humped together, rifles between our knees, circulating our “ battle bowlers ” on our heads to stop the itch, settling into our web like horses into harness. Then came the first jolt, first of many, as we ground our way in low gear across the camp to the open road. *

Unfortunately, manoeuvres did not alwavs commence with this sybaritic

ease. They were more likely to be ushered in by a protracted route march of some fifteen miles to the setting of the drama. This was the case in the manoeuvres at Waiouru. We knew every pebble in the desert road, every stopping place for burning feet, every creek at which to gulp water, because we had kicked them, stopped at them, and gulped at them on the way to or from, a manoeuvre.

I remember those stunts at Waiouru well. Who doesn’t ? Most of us from the North Island were immured for some time among the frigid tussocks which clotted the skirts of Ruapehu. And of the many aspects of Waiouru life which terrorized the embryo soldier, the most detested was the exercise of manoeuvres. No place on earth could flash such kaleidoscopic changes over its face as the Desert Plain. From scalding sand to icy waste was a matter of moments. Distance was illimitable. You could march in any direction of the t compass for fiftv miles. We did.

I remember one manoeuvre. I was a runner to an officer who, being an old fox at the game, reckoned that the most comfortable manoeuvre was that spent in captivity back at the enemy base (which, oddly enough, was always the officers’ mess). To further his ideas, he always displayed great willingness to be captured—often risking his manoeuvre life in the process. Bombs, machine guns, hand grenades meant nothing to Mr. X, provided that he saw capture at the end of the ordeal. This day it took half an hour (which must have raised his average), and I was dragged off with himbut not to the officers’ mess. Because he tricked me, bamboozled me properly. As we were led back to the rear lines, we passed a running Ariel. Our guards were thinking of their tea, not of us. Quoth Mr. X : “ Grab that motor-bike and hop it back to our own lines. Go on—they (the guards) won’t notice.”

An order’s an order. I obeyed—as injured as a man whose beer has been drunk by some one else behind his back. I knew that even if I did convert the bike (and I had ridden only once before), I would have had the devil’s own job in

getting back to our own territory. Miles of tussock, miles of road, miles of enemy lay between me and them —and it was starting to sleet like the South Pole. ■ I walked up to the bike. I lifted one leg over the saddle. I tried the throttle. A deep-seated roar shook me—but it wasn’t the bike—merely its owner. He towered over me : “ What’s the idea, mate ? ” “ Just trying it out,” I said. “ Damned cheek ! ” he said. “ Get off.” I climbed down slowly and walked away. He hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t wearing the white arm band of his own battalion. I walked away; it was getting dark; the rain was drizzling down ; sleet was mixed up in it like sand in sugar ; and while Mr. X was going back to beer and a fire in the officers’ mess, I vanished in the sodden darkness. Every one in these days knows about fox-holes—they’re as well known as ( teacaddies. Every soldier finds his way into a fox-hole almost as soon as he finds his way into the King’s uniform. But in those days back in 1941 it was different. We never dug fox-holes on manoeuvres, we built bivouacs- — wigwams of sticks and manuka scrub, with a groundsheet stretched over and tied down to make them waterproof. They weren’t waterproof, though— always trickled in one way or another, and following the ancient method of torture, dripped molecule by molecule down your neck or in your eye. If a storm blew up; the whole penthouse was twitched away like the sheet in a magician’s trick, or else the elements, failing to take it from above, tried the underhand way, with flood waters sluicing the ground beneath.

Whatever happened “ bivvies” were seldom a success. Another thing that was remarkable about those Waiouru manoeuvres was the way people disappeared. It was not unusual for a whole section, platoon, even company to disappear for days on endjust disappear into the vast, untrodden pampas of the Waiouru Desert. A few days would pass while the manoeuvre tangled itself up like a child's fishing-line. Then at the height of the confusion, red-hats on every hill-top, rumours ricochetting right and left, imaginary bombs forming an imaginary hail overhead, the missing company would emerge with triumph from the Vast Unknown, claiming innumerable prisoners and a victory of “ strategic surprise.” Which done, they would sit down and eat their heads off, having fared meagrely on roots and iron rations during their disappearance. Those were the days when we played at war in New Zealand. The Pacific dozed comfortably x in a lull of false security Japan, although an aggressor in China for years, had not yet turned her guns to the south-east, whither her eyes had long been glancing covetously. So manoeuvres were casual affairs, not taken too seriously. Many of us repented of this flippancy later and wished that we had learnt more on the Desert Plain. Some day, perhaps, we will go back and look at the road on which we marched, the streams we drank at, the holes we dug, and the emplacements we constructed with .so much grumbling, and think, “ Well, we were lucky that we didn’t have to use them.” We werelucky.