PRISONERS AT SAIGON

Evening Star, Issue 24278, 20 August 1942, Page 5

PRISONERS AT SAIGON

FRENCH SMUGGLE IN FOOD V JAPANESE EDICTS IGNORED (llec. 11.20 a.m.) NEW YORK, Aug. 19. How the French people are Keeping thousands of Australian prisoners alive at Saigon is told by Mr Reiman Morin, formerly the Associated Press correspondent in the Far East, in a despatch from the Gripsholm, the diplomatic exchange liner. Mr Morin says French Indo-China is exhibit A in the Far, Eastern showcase tragedies. The first' white colony in the Orient to fall, through a combination of bluff and Axis pressure on Vichy, it has become Japan’s most important land base. Tha French stay there because they cannot get away. French shipping has ’ been commandeered entirely by the- Japanese. The French people are merely existing; they go through the motions of living in the bitter knowledge that their work helps the Japanese conqueror. Yet, wherever they' can,' the French are still fighting—that is, 90 per cent, of the mass. You can draw a sharp distinction between them and the Government, with . its hordes of petty functionaires. In the first three months two Japanese ammunition dumps were blown into the . sky by bullets fired at night. The Hanoi-Saigon railway has been wrecked three times. Several thousand Australian prisoners are concentrated along the Saigon docks. The Japanese have forbidden all communication with them, yet the French are literally keeping them alive, smuggling food, medical supplies, and tobacco through the fences at night*