CALL TO ACTION

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20507, 18 March 1941, Page 5

CALL TO ACTION

SOLDIER TO CIVILIANS NEED OF FULL EFFORT SUPPORT OF FIGHTING MEN The need for civilians to back to the Jimit the efforts of the men serving the Empire in the front line is urged by a New Zealand soldier in a letter to relatives in Wellington. "The boys here are very fed-up with the way people at Home haggle and argue about their 40-HWur week, more money and less work, and holidays about every other month, while in every paper we get there is always the story of totalisator receipts going up and up,” the soldier writes. “There is no doubt there Is a tremendous lot of patriotic work golhg oh, and some of the people must be working like niggers to help things along, but anyone who sees a newsreel to-day with pictures of England falling in ruins and little children and old men and women being bombed out of their homes must surely realise they cannot go on as before.

“We can and will win this war, but we could win it so much more easily if everyone was determined to produce more of the things we need. Perhaps you will think I am a bit grouchy tonight. but when one gets away from New Zealand and gets a more distant but more impartial view one cannot help hoping that some day very soon the people at home Will realise that a few men with guns in their hands cannot light a nation of 90,000,000 mobilised people without the backing of everyone in civilian life.

“England Was going along in the same old way until Dunkirk, but then they awakened to the fact that the enemy was at the gates, and every man and woman had to heave to and take a share in overtaking Ihe apathy which almost led to disaster,”