For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard

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СКАЧАТЬ Air Marshal Saul for consorting with the enemy.

      We now started to do some low-level stuff, and eventually we were told that we were not to come lower than 7,000 feet; we were Hurricane bombers and, you know, one bomb, dropping it from 7,000 feet, you’d never hit anything. You were very lucky if you did. If you went down and strafed anything you got a rap on the knuckles – it was so bloody stupid. I went to “Mary” Coningham [Air Vice-Marshal] and I said, “You know, this is absolutely bloody ridiculous, sir, we’re not being effective.” You know, low-level strafing on the desert, there was miles and miles of transport you could shoot at. Sure, you have casualties, but it was worth it and we did it from D-Day onwards. We did a lot of it – all our stuff was low-level. Even if you didn’t set a vehicle on fire you frightened the hell out of them, which was pretty demoralising, you know. If you get 12 aircraft line astern and they’re shooting up a convoy, it causes a hell of a panic.’

      Keith Newth, a Corporal of Regimental Signals in the NZ 20th Battalion of Infantry, moved up to the desert in the latter stages of 1941 and went into his first action there. But before long his unit was sent to Greece:

      ‘Back in Alexandra from Crete, we were entrained back to Cairo. The next day, I’ll never forget arriving back in the Cairo station – there was Lady Killern to meet her New Zealand boys. We were taken up to King Farouk’s castle or whatever it was and given a wonderful dinner. The Egyptians seemed to absolutely fall in love with the Kiwis. They were wonderful to us, and yet they would rob their own mothers. I had a little boy come to me, “Kiwi, cigarette Kiwi”, so I handed him a packet of cigarettes. It had only one cigarette in it – he said, “It’s your last cigarette,” and he wouldn’t take it.

      And I’m certain no soldier ever dreamed of the idea of being a prisoner of war. Anyway, I was wounded and captured at Sidi Rezegh by the Germans. And the next thing I knew was, a German officer said to me, as he leaned out of his tank, “For you the war is over.” I had my left arm broken and he got a splint and put my arm in this splint, stopped an Italian truck, kicked the co-driver out of it, stuck me in and told the driver to take me to the hospital at Derna. And the next morning I remember Rommel coming along and looking at everybody with his stern look. First words he said were, “Why so many prisoners?” which made you shake a bit. The next thing he said was, “You will attend to the worst cases here, be they British, German, Italian or what,” and that was the type of man he was.

      So then I was taken back to hospital in Derna and they took me to the German Hospital. It was full, so they took me to the Italian Hospital. It had 20 beds in the ward and they were full except for one for me and these Italians – I thought they were all Italians – and I was a bit unpopular, as you can understand. They said, ‘Your RAF, boom, boom, boom.”

      I said, “Oh yes, I know what you mean.”

      By gosh, they knew what they were talking about, because that night, in the middle of the night, the RAF came over and they bombed all right, because the hospital had ack-ack guns all around it. And all these Italian orderlies at the hospital had taken off – they didn’t worry about us. And the bombs blew all the glass out of the windows and so forth and my bed collapsed with the top end of the bed down on the floor and my broken arm had nothing done to it – it was broken in two places. I had to get myself up off the floor and get myself out of that.

       Keith Lewis Newth

      And that was on the Monday night, and on the following Friday they decided to do something about my broken arm and the doctor – they had no anaesthetic, nothing at all – he just got one chap to hang on to the elbow and another to pull on the hand and he bound it up. But he bound it up with the bones in the wrong direction – instead of butting to each other they were crossed – so it was a dead loss and eventually they had to be broken again and reset. That’s another thought that will never leave me, what I went through there. There was in the operating room five beds. I was in the first one, luckily. They did my arm, no anaesthetic, and if I started to faint the chap behind slapped you across the face because they did not want you to go out on them. But next to me they took a chap’s leg off, and you could hear them scraping the bone, and another one, they did work on his kneecap and another one’s arm was taken off, and all were done without anaesthetics. The chaps who had the amputations said for a start there was very sharp pain, but then once they hit the bone it sort of went dead. But, oh hell, you could almost hear chaps scream back in New Zealand.

      I was lucky, in fact, because I was taken across to Italy in a hospital ship, Cecilia, but the ship our boys, the 20th Battalion boys, were being taken across to Italy on was torpedoed by our own people and, while not all of them were drowned, I don’t think many of them were saved because they were battened down anyhow, so they couldn’t get out. More of the horrors of war of course.’

      New Zealander Kenneth Frater, a driver in the 2nd NZ Supply Column, part of the 5th Brigade, was also caught up in the fighting around Sidi Rezegh:

      ‘When daylight came we were near a New Zealand Field Dressing Station at Sidi Rezegh. Our escort went off apparently to join in the battle, which seemed to be in progress on all sides. We were asked to move as we were making a target of the Dressing Station. There was constant tank and artillery fire, and wherever we moved we were told to get the hell out of it as we were spoiling a line of fire or making an unnecessary target. An Artillery Major told us we were interfering with a perfectly good battle. Eventually we moved to a comparatively quiet area near Divisional HQ behind our troops, who were attacking the enemy forces besieging Tobruk. Here we unloaded our loads of rations. At last somebody was glad to see us. The forces at Sidi Rezegh had not received rations for 48 hours. Tich Cotterell, in charge of our unit, was awarded the Military Cross for bringing soft transport through three enemy armoured columns and getting urgently needed supplies to our fighting troops. Sergeant Stan Grubb had also been a tower of strength, but he received no recognition.

      Through the day other transport trucks and personnel trickled into the area and we were becoming a large target and limiting movement of fighting weapons. The General decided we had to be got rid of, so as soon as it was dark we lined up nose-to-tail and the infantry punched a hole in the German line to allow us to move through behind the Tobruk defences. The engineers moved behind the infantry and swept a clear track through the minefield, which was about a mile deep. The only indication was a tape left to show the way. It was a stop-start trip with shells flying around. At times during a stop someone would go to sleep and the vehicles in front would be out of sight. Then someone would have to walk with the tape in hand to find the way. By daylight most were safely through.’

       Kenneth Carrol Frater

      Kenneth Frater’s Supply Column joined the rest of the NZ Division in Syria, but in June 1942 was in the rush to get back to Egypt because of Rommel’s rapid advance. Working from a supply dump at Mersa Matruh, his unit just made it back to the Alamein Defence Line ahead of the Germans. However, his troubles were by no means over:

      ‘We dispersed our trucks singly at about 75-yard intervals. The cook started up the burner to cook a meal. There were four planes stooging slowly round with wing lights on, so we naturally assumed they were ours. People were drifting towards the radio truck to listen to the 9pm news. The driver from next to us arrived at our truck and my No 2 and I were just starting off with him to hear the news when bombs started screaming down. We saw the radio truck hit and threw ourselves to the ground. The last bomb in the string exploded alongside us, luckily in soft sand. The other driver took most of the damage as he was nearest to the bomb with me alongside him and my No 2 further away. I was deaf in my right ear and couldn’t hear much out of the other, my neck hurt, and when I stood up I was lame, but СКАЧАТЬ