TWO MINUTES OF WAR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25372, 2 November 1943, Page 2

TWO MINUTES OF WAR

WOUNDED NEW ZEALANDERS (Rec. 11.30 pm.) SYDNEY, Nov. 1. Two New Zealanders who trained for two vears to fight, landed with the forces in the Treasury Group, and within two minutes were finished with this war. Both were badly wounded. Three war correspondents gave them first aid.

The story is told by Mr Keith Palmer, the Melbourne Herald correspondent in the Solomons. “ Stretcher bearers gently lifted the badlywounded men into a barge,” he writes. “Mr Pat Robinson, of the International News Service, a last war veteran, bandaged the leg of one boy. Mr John Fairfax, of the Sydney Morning Herald, injected morp'iia into the other lad, easing his agony from three severe wounds, as Mr Archer Thomas, of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, read to Mr Fairfax the instructions from the morphia package.”. The wounded men subsequently received treatment on an American warship, and when Mr Palmer saw them later he describes them as grinning their thanks behind stubbie and jungle paint, “ Not easily will I forget the courage of that lean-jawed, tightlipped man, fighting back the pain of his shattered knee and wounded back without even a groan,” writes Mr Fairfax, who adds that the kindliness of the American sailors to the courageous wounded New Zealanders was “something better than ail the lend-leasc in the world.”