IN EAST END

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24415, 28 September 1940, Page 12

IN EAST END

SENSELESS MASSACRE AUSTRALIANS’ REACTION ANGER AND DISGUST Australian soldiers, facing their first experience of massed air attack with perfect coolness, have played a courageous part in the indiscriminate bombings to which London has been subjected. wrote Kenneth Slessor. official war correspondent with the A.I.F. in England, on September 12. Until then the Australians did not realise the actuality of Hitler’s war methods. They had read of the senseless massacre of women and children* but did not think they would see it themselves at close quarters. Now they know. They have seen women old and young deliberately killed before their eyes. They have seen babies maimed before they could walk, and harmless families smudged out among the wreckage of their homes. So they are waiting all the more grimly for the day of reckoning. This is not the kind of fighting they had imagined. They can neither forgive nor understand it. With dull anger, they have helped in the work ox rescue and protection, but under then, outward calm a flame of horror and disgust has been lit which will not be easily nut out. “Look at the Sky!” Corporal L. Robinson, of Melbourne, told me that he had been saying goodbye to some relatives in the East End oir Saturday evening—his last day or leave. On the way back he stopped to talk to a British sailor in the street “The air was quite clear then, he said. “Suddenly the sailor grabbed me by an arm. “‘Good God!’ he yelled. Look at tliG skyJ * , “It was like a cloud going over the sun. The sky was dark with planes. The next thing we knew was hell seemed to be coming down in lumps. “There was a terrace of houses opposite me, and I saw it yanish. Buildings do not blow up in the way 1 thought they did. They just seemed to lift off ‘ at the roots,’ rise in the air and fall flat. “There were a lot of thumping noises, but you’d be surprised how small the spread of a bomb is. I realised there was no need to be frightened if a man kept his head. “ Just then I noticed a crowd of kids, about four or five years old, running about without a sign of fear. They were singing out: ‘Mum, where’s me gas mask? ’ “I found that I was still with the sailor. “‘Where are you going, Digger?”' he asked. “ Where are you? ” I said. “ ‘ Blow going down below,’ ” he said. “ ‘ There’s more air on deck.” ’ “ So we stayed ‘ on deck.’ “Just then there was another big thump round the corner, and we both ran down the street where it had happened, because sometimes A.R.P. workers don’t get there at once. “There was a nurse running with us and she had a bag. I have never seen a woman more game. Somehow, those women seem to lose their fear at a time like that. But there was nobody I could see that you could call reallv frightened. “ There's nothing fearful about an incendiary bomb. It’s just like those fairy sparkler fireworks we used to wave when we were’ kids. , “ The sailor said: ‘ Pinch any buckets you see, we might need them for putting out a fire.’ All Wanting to Help “ By this time a lot of other people had arrived wanting to help. The first, building we came to, I could hear a girl inside crying as if she had hysterics. It wasn’t a building a bomb had hit. but it seemed to have been cracked to pieces by the force of an explosion near it. All those places are so old that the floor shakes when you sneeze.” After describing his own efforts, he said: “Altogether I saw about 30 Diggers that night, all helping in the rescue work, and as cool as if they’d been born under bombs. Most of them had dumped their tin hats and respirators so that they could got round more freely. “ I was proud to be among those boys. They didn’t care a darn about themselves. They were just seeing what they could do. I don’t think that there was a Digger in London who went into a shelter all night. “That’s the first time I’ve seen our boys in a crisis—under fire, as you might say—and if they act like that. I’m glad to be with them.”