DEATHS PREVENTED

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 54, Issue 32624, 21 September 1945, Page 6

DEATHS PREVENTED

BY

PATRIOTIC PARCELS

FORMER PRISONER’S THANKS “As an ex-prisoner of war. after three and a half years in captivity, I must say if it was not for the patriotic organisations and the Red Cross, New Zealand’s death roll in camps of prisoners of war would have been very high. There were not enough rations to keep us going and the boys would have starved. But, to be polite, it was known as malnutrition.”

So says a letter received by the Thames Patriotic Committee fromi Private R. P. Lynn, of Onehunga, l Auckland, who went to Fiji with the original Eighth Infantry Brigade, then went to Africa, being captured at Sidi Re'zegh, was on a torpedoed ship going to Italy, taken from there to Germany when the Italians capitulated, and then was marched through Poland to Bavaria, to be rescued by the Americans.

Recently, in the Freyberg wing of the prisoner-of-war reception depot at Folkestone, a patriotic parcel from Thames was distributed to him.