Work in progress
Previous |Contents | NextSunday 6 September. A spectacular dog fight this morning. Eight planes down today, four of ours and four German. I walked over to inspect some wreckage. The plane had been in a dive and failed to come out of it. Previous |Contents | NextSunday 6 September. A spectacular dog ... Read more
Previous |Contents | Next The New Zealand Division had been transferred to Syria and Lebanon in part to recover from the hammering it had taken in Operation Crusader. After the action in which Cliff was wounded, the New Zealanders had in fact captured Sidi Resegh, temporarily linking up with the garrison ... Read more
Previous |Contents | Next Cliff’s next letter was dated 25 May, ten days later, and he was writing from Syria. They’d traveled by bus to Haifa, then by train to Damascus. As context it’s interesting to note that Cliff was in Damascus over 80 years ago, but little more than 20 ... Read more
Previous | Contents | Next By mid-May Cliff was in Palestine. They’d travelled there by train in goods vans and cattle trucks, a stop-and-start journey and a good deal of it at night while they tried to sleep. The following is from Cliff’s letters home to Dorothy. ~ Ian § ... Read more
Previous | Contents A few days later Cliff wrote from the Signal School, N.Z.E.F., Middle East Forces. They were at 2NZEF’s main depot and training camp near Maadi, about 8 miles up the Nile from downtown Cairo. Although he couldn’t tell Dorothy exactly where they were, he did say he ... Read more
| Contents | Next “Div Sigs” — Divisional Signals — was a specialist unit of the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force, whose members were seconded to the various Brigades, Battalions etc to maintain communications. There were two ways to communicate: by radio or by phone (i.e. landlines — likely to ... Read more