DEATH PENALTY

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 26, 30 July 1940, Page 7

DEATH PENALTY

FRENCH VOLUNTEERS SERVING ABROAD

(Received July 30, 9.50 a.m.)

LONDON, July 29

The Petain Government has decreed the death penalty for all French volunteers serving abroad.

OUT FROM HONG KONG

THE FIRST EVACUEES

SHELTER IN AUSTRALIA

(By Trans-Tasman Air Mail, from "The Post's" Representative.)

SYDNEY, July 26.

About 3000 women and children evacuated from Hong Kong will come to Australia, and will be accommodated in the various State capitals. About 40 per cent, will come to Sydney and a similar percentage will go to Melbourne, the remainder being equally distributed among the other four States. State commitees which were set up for the reception of British children under the now postponed plan will co-operate with the Federal Government in finding temporary homes for the women and children from Hong Kong. The Government will waive migration regulations to enable evacuated families to bring native servants with them if they wish. Evacuees for the southern States will be met at a Queensland port by State Departmental officials and given advice and information before they reach Sydney. Accommodation is being arranged at hotels and boarding-houses in accordance with the means at their disposal,. The Australian Governments will be reimbursed by the Hong Kong Government for expenditure incurred in receiving and accommodating the evacuees, who will not be a charge on Australia. The evacuees will reach Australia during the next few weeks in four steamers, but yesterday a vessel brought 110 women and children, including many babies in arms. They are the vanguard of 4000 ordered to leave Hong Kong as a precautionary measure, following the proclamation by the Government there of the existence of a state of public danger. They made their own sailing arrangements and paid their own passage money. t Some of the party told graphic stories of the tenseness of the position when the evacuation was ordered, and the crowded conditions under which many of the evacuees travelled from Hong Kong to Manila. In contrast with these complaints was the praise bestowed on American citizens for their efforts to make the evacuees comfortable and happy at Manila. Many United States naval and army officers and their wives, it was stated, voluntarily vacated their bungalows to provide homes for the evacuees. DISCOMFORT ON SHIPBOARD. Mrs. S. J. Benson, a naval officer's wife, referring to the mass evacuation of women and children from Hong Kong to Manila, said that she travelled on a liner which carried 2000 passengers. "The discomfort was appalling," she said. "Beds in the lounges and passage-ways were about five inches apart. 'Eight or nine people shared cabins. We lived on army rations — stew, thick soup, tea in .pannikins. We received the order to stand by on Friday night. On Saturday the order to leave was confirmed, and we left on Monday. I locked up the house I lived in and left everything as it was." Many of the women who arrived in Sydney wore fur coats over slacks. Most left Hong Kong with only tropic clothes. The youngest evacuee, a five-month-old girl, arrived in a zipper bag carried by her mother. They left Hong Kong in the heaviest rain for 16 years, and met a typhoon in the China Sea.