Japanese Pay Anzacs Tribute

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 181, 2 August 1941, Page 16

Japanese Pay Anzacs Tribute

\ GLOWING tribute to the heroes of Crete is paid by the Japan "Times Advertiser," organ of the Foreign Oflice, which suggests the creation of a special order of knighthood embracing every officer and man of the British Imperial and Greek forces participating in this "strangest war in history."

The "Times Advertiser" writes:— "Un reinforced, unfed, unshaved. unslept, unrelieved, unwashed, unled in terrible confusion, unsupported by anti-aircraft guns, uncertain of escape, untended when wounded, unburied when dead, unremittingly bombed and blasted, exhausted, redeyed, grim, gaunt, stripped of the veneer of civilisation in the long last condition of fear, knowing only bloody hand-to-hand fighting was their lot; dimly pondering in the half light a demoniacal torment, for all they knew enduring Armageddon —this was the incredibly horrible reality of those gallants which only Dante could describe.

"Knowing the final fear, these battalions never can know peace again, but at least they can accept the adulation of lesser folk who have followed the course of the war and now would bestow laurels. That is, if they have time or stomach for petty honours after that screaming fury of fire, detonation, blood and anguish."

Even the Germans, the paper suggests, will raise a hand in testimony toward those whose heads are bloodied but unbowed, and, it adds if the Anzacs were asked about the' men with wings who overwhelmed them, they would answer in the characteristic idiom of their country, the upraised thumb. "The world now realises," the paper concludes, "that its men are not decadent and that the German Italian and British are a vastlv better breed than Nature previously produced because culture is improved by discipline and sacrifice The Japanese, these admirers of physical courage and self-sacrifice, grant particular honours to the samurai of Crete."