WAR NEWS IN BRIEF

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 November 1944, Page 4

WAR NEWS IN BRIEF

EX-SERVICE “TRAMPS”

LONDON, October 31.

In five weeks 104 former servicemen and two former servicewomen have been dealt with as “tramps” by the Yorkshire Casual Poor Assistance Committee. A local aiderman said: “Men are being discharged from the Army in poor health and with tattered clothing inadequate for their search for work. There is no doubt that jobs are not there for them, and the sooner we admit it the better.” The committee condemned the Government for its inaction on “the increasing problem of vagrancy.”

MARRIAGE TO ALIENS

LONDON, October 31. “The British Government is asking the views of the Dominions about the possibility of amending the law to enable British women marrying aliens to retain British nationality,” says the “Daily Telegraph.” “A change is unlikely until the question has been fully discussed at an Imperial Conference after the war, because the Government believes all the Dominions should act together. The Women’s Central Advisory Committe recently sent a deputation to the Home Secretary urging that war-time marriages to members of the United Nations Forces gave the question a new urgency.”

GERMAN HOME GUARD

LONDON, October 31.

“German workers are breaking under the strain of long working hours added to compulsory training for homo defence,” says the “Daily Express” correspondent on the German frontier. “Germans are forced to work from 60 to 72 hours a week in factories and then do several hours’ training daily in the Volkssturm (Home Guard). Hundreds are falling ill every day.” The Berlin newspaper “Volks Zeitung” has warned the Nazis that Germany has not sufficient arms to provide the Volkssturm even with improvised equipment. It said: “Primitive weapons cannot stop tanks and pitchforks are of no use against machine-guns. To fling themselves on the invading forces wilL cost the German people rivers of blood.” The Moscow radio says the German High Command is closing German Air Force training camps and sending the trainees as troops to the front lines? The radio quotes Corporal Herbert Schwartz, of the 551st German Infantry Division, who was captured recently on the Eastern Front, as saying that several units of his division were formed of flying school trainees. Another captured German, an officer who served five years as a flying instructor, said that his school had been closed and the staff sent to a military | camp near Wurms,