INTO BERLIN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 95, 23 April 1945, Page 4

INTO BERLIN

"THE war has been carried into Berlin itself. American and Soviet •*■ forces are believed to be close to meeting, and probably have already met. These are events for which the Allied people have long waited and worked, and their fighting men have foughtf and suffered. They are events which to scores of millions of people will signify that the fighting, the suffering and the work have not been in vain. Among these millions there will be felt to-day a fierce satisfaction that the war which was plotted and begun by Germany, which Germans hoped would always be fought in lands beyond the Reich, is now being ended in Germany. There is no other way and no other place in which it could be ended if one of its results is to be to convince Germans that war is not glorious. If we would understand the full significance of the?" events we must recall something of what has gone before them. German forces were once at El Alamein and in Stalingrad. Other German forces once torpedoed American ships within sight of the American coast. It is from these far-separated regions, so remote from Germany, that the Allies have fought their way to the triumphant positions they hold to-day. Before this advance on to German soil became anything more than a dream of the future the British Eighth Army, including our own New Zealanders, had to defeat Rommel and pursue him across North Africa; the Soviet armies, after endless miles of retreating, had to summon the strength which enabled them finally to check the invaders and then to go forward; and British, Canadian and United States navies had to win the desperately-fought Battle of the Atlantic. Then only did the miracles of planning which resulted in the invasion of North and North-west Africa, and of Normandy, and in the great advances of the Soviet armies which swept the Germans from Russian soil, became possible of accomplishment. And behind all the fighting men was the effort, the gigantic effort in total, made by the civilian peoples. They worked, as their servicemen fought, because they believed in the justice of the Allied cause. They worked also, as their servicemen fought, in the hope that one day, no matter how long it might be deferred, there would come the stupendous events of which there is news to-day.