ONLY A SCRATCH

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 61, Issue 251, 5 August 1941, Page 3

ONLY A SCRATCH

WAR DAMAGE TO LONDON. OBJECT OF GERMAN BOMBING

“London has suffered much, I must admit (yet it is hardly more than scratched, as far as its whole area is counted), but people are standing up to it most splendidly, nor have we the slightest intention of giving up the fight—but we mean to do our very best to hold our own,” writes Dr. Russel Rendle, at one time of Ashburton, in a, letter to Mr W. H. Rundle. “I have seen something of what they have done in London, much that you saw when you were in France 2§ years ago. It makes one’s blood boil with anger. I am quite willing to admit that war is war, it must be horrible, but there is a fair way to wage it and an unfair way, which last is the German way entirely. They scattered bombs all over London, especially in the East End, where poor people live, far removed from any possible object that serves as any use in War, a manufactory or anything else like that. They bombed Coventry almost out of existence, have done the same to my own city of Plymouth, destroying the residential area, the shopping centre, also any churches or hospitals they could see on three almost consecutive nights, leaving the dockyard—and naval ports carefully alone, lest they might be hit back, I suppose. The courage and fortitude of the ordinary London people is embodied in the following extract from the letter: “I was down in the East yesterday and saw a street of small one-storey houses completely gutted and destroyed; one tiny room was being used as a vegetable store, its window had been boarded up and on the hoards was painted: ‘Bombed out of shop but not out of business.' This touched me much. Could any more pluck and grit be displayed by anyone? I do not see how. All along the big streets, Oxford, Regent, Piccadilly, Cheapside, Queen Victoria and others there are any number of destroyed houses, the whole area between Bart’s and St. Paul’s, some quarter of a mile roughly, is exactly what the French villages must have looked like in 1918, hut 'people have mended their shops as far as possible, and carry on business to best of their ability. Oh, we are undoubtedly a dashed hard nation to bowl over, though I recognise that we are going to have a dashed big task to fulfil if we mean to hold our own. However, it is no use my going on like that, much water will have rolled down the Thames and many strange things will be known by you long before this letter reaches you, if indeed it ever does.”