REALISM OF WAR

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 225, 22 August 1945, Page 5

REALISM OF WAR

JAPANESE BARBARITY.

LONDON EXHIBITION. (N.Z. Press Association. —Copyright.) Rec. 11.10 a.m.) LONDON, Aug. 21. Opening a "Victory Over Japan" exhibition on a bombed site, the Prime Minister (Mr Attlee) said: "The war is over, but everyone on these islands should remember the great debt we owe to our own countrymen and the men from the Dominions who bore the hardships of the long campaigns. "You will recall how our gallant kith and kin from New Zealand and Australia sent the elite of their Fighting Forces to aid against Germany and then found their homelands threatened by an enemy fanatically brave and barbarously cruel. "Let us not forget that the Japanese hordes in a few months swept over more than half a million square miles of British territory containing nearly 25,000,000 of the King's subjects. You will see a record of savagery and brutal exploitation which were the method of the Japanese," added the Prime Minister. "You will see how we fought back, inch by inch, in Burma, New Guinea and Borneo, mastering the art of jungle warfare and eventually beating the Japanese at their own game. We should remember the names of the great actors of this drama, Admiral Mountbatten, and General Slim in Burma, General' Blarney and his Australians in New Guinea, and Admirals Power and Rawlings on the high seas. "There are. many graves in those distant lands. There are many who are returning with marks of suffer - ing from years of imprisonment in conditions unfit for beasts and subject to the cruelty and callousness of the Japanese military caste." Jungle realism Vs the keynote of the exhibition. Giant cobwebs brush against the faces of passing visitors. They hear the sound of running water, the noise of insects, the wails of jackals and hycutas. Records of thest. sounds were made by the Army Film Unit. The temperaturo in the jungle section of the exhibition is kept at 120 degrees to add further to the realism. English-speaking Gurkhas of the 14th Army act as guides, at the exhibition.