Never Forget Debt To Our Fighting Men

Northern Advocate, 22 August 1945, Page 3

Never Forget Debt To Our Fighting Men

—Attlee (Rec. 11.35 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 in these islands should remember the great debt we owe our own countrymen and men from the Dominions who bore the hardships of long campaigns. “You will recall how our gallant kith and kin in New Zealand and Australia sent the elite of their fighting forces to aid us against Germany, and then found their homelands thi’eatened by an enemy fantastically bi'ave and barbarously cruel. Let us not forget that Japanese hordes in a few months swept over more than 500,000 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 was the method of the Japanese. 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 in this drama: Admiral Lord Mountbatten and General Slim, in Burma, General Blarney and his Australians in New Guinea, Admirals Power and Rawlings on the High Seas. “There are many graves in those distant lands. There are many who are returning with the marks of suffering from years of imprisonment in conditions unfit for beasts, and subjected to the cruelty and callousness of the Japanese military cast.’’ Jungle realism is 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 and the wails of jackals and hyenas. Records of these sounds have been made by an army film unit. The temperature of the jungle section of the exhibition is kept at 120 degrees to add further to the realism. English-speaking Gurkhas and men of the 14th Army act as guides at the exhibition.