BRITAIN IN WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 23, 28 January 1944, Page 5

BRITAIN IN WAR

VISITORS' IMPRESSIONS

THE WILL FOR VICTORY

(Special to Press Association.) Rec. 12.40 p.m. LONDON, January 27. For nearly four and a half years New Zealanders' impressions of wartime Britain have been formed by the daily Press and radio reports, and by private letters. Throughout the period all these mediums of communication have been the subject of censorship, including, perhaps, most important of all, the voluntary censorship imposed from patriotic motives and influenced also by the characteristic British tendency of understatement. Many New Zealanders must have often wondered, how accurate is the picture of wartime Britain which has thus been built? up in their minds and to what degree it is a propaganda picture. This thought was prominent in the minds of three daily newspaper editors when, as members of a party of five New Zealand newspaper men, they landed in Britain on December 28. Since then, through a necessarily hurried but fairly comprehensive tour in which they have seen many aspects of life in wartime Britain, they have been enabled to draw some general conclusions.

CONFIDENTLY ENDURING,

The picture common to New Zealanders is on the whole accurate, and considering the continual difficulties of the wartime news services, including the shortage of newspaper space, it is astonishingly accurate. Grim bvt gay was a description Mr. Churchill once gave of the British people's spirit. It would hardly be an appropriate phrase now. After four and a half years of wartime strain the people are not gay, at any rate not in winter when the black-out lasts 14£ hours and full daylight less than eight hours. Today they are patiently, confidently, and cheerfully enduring. That they are tired let there be no doubt. (In this respect there is a striking contrast between the physical appearance of servicemen and civilians.) They are longing for it all to be over, and looking for the day when the light can be turned up. '■> , ... Recently, just before black-out time, a London borough, for technical reasons, turned on its street lights fully for a few minutes, and one newspaper published a photograph of children gazing at them in wide-eyed wonder. It was for the visitor a pathetic picThose children wondered what had happened and what was about to happen It is for the sake of the children that the British people are longing for the end of the German war. HIGH CONFIDENCE IN LEADERS. While they are patiently longing for the end and therefore naturally too much disposed to recognise in current happenings signs that it will inevitably come this year, the British people will accept only one end—the total defeat and surrender of Germany. For that they have suffered and endured, for that they have worked, and that and nothing less they mean to have. If, to secure that end, they have to endure wartime conditions beyond 1944, they will do so, although they will need to be convinced that any such •prolongation -is inevitable, and does not arise from shpr^comihgs or errors of leadership, whether military or political. Just now their confidence in their leaders is high. Indeed one's impression is that on the military side it is frighteningly high. Large numbers of people seem to feel the assurance, unshadowed by any kind of doubt, that the promised invasion of Europe, which requires an amphibious expedition of unprecedented magnitude and which (unless! there should be a marked weakening of the German will to resist) must meet with unprecedented difficulties, simply cannot go wrong. They accept in principle the idea'of heavy casualties of which they have been warned, but in their hearts they trust their! leaders to know how to avoid them. But, casualties or not, their resolution | will be unchanged. This war, which Germany began and which Germany has fought throughout on non-German soil, is going to be finished on German soil. The Germans are going to be beaten, and they are going to know it. That is the motive of the British people, and that is the .predominant purpose of British activity in all spheres today. And when that supreme purpose is accomplished—what then?

The above is the first of five articles by Messrs. E. Dumbleton, P. H. N. Freeth, W. A. Wh'itlock, three of the party of New Zealand journalists now visiting England. Their views on post-war prospects will be discussed in a second article.