MANY DIFFICULTIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25560, 13 June 1944, Page 4

MANY DIFFICULTIES

CAMPAIGN IN ITALY MR FRASER’S IMPRESSIONS (Official News Service) (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, June 11. The New Zealand Prime Minister, Mr P. Fraser, returned to London by air to-day. He was greatly impressed by what he had seen of both the New'Zealand trooDS and the Allied forces generally. He commented that although he had followed the Italian campaign closely through very full reports it was not until he saw for himself the nature of the terrain and the natural obstacles it presented, together with scenes of some of their hardest actions, that he felt he properly understood what the troops had gone through. “People who wondered at the time, some of them in a critical way, why the advance of our armies seemed so slow,” Mr Fraser said, “need only spend a day at Cassino or further along Highway Six on the road to Home to find the answer to that question. The reason is clear and indisputable. Even now when the weather is warm and dry little imagination is needed to make one realise what conditions were like during the winter months. It was plain to the layman, he said, that the nature of Central Italy, with the jumble of mountains and narrow, twisting roads, greatly favoured the Germans. They had been fighting a defensive action, and had months to choose and prepare the best possible positions. There is no doubt either about the skill with which the German rearguards went about the task oi slowing up our advance. All the way from Naples to Rome he had seen how they had torn up railway lines, blown up bridges, left huge craters in the roadway, and sown mines thickly in the fields. , , ~ “ But our men and the men of all the United Nations fought magnificently. They are winning the battle m spite of everything Nature and the enemy put in their way, and now they are winning it in record time. They are sure of themselves, and deservedly so, and with every fresh mile of advance their spirits are rising higher and higher.” Mr Fraser said one of his most striking impressions was the remarkable blend of United Nations forces that made up the armies in Italy. There were men from every part of the British Isles, New Zealanders, Canadians, Americans, Indians, Poles, and Frenchmen—not in mere token forces, but in strength, working and fighting together in the kind of harmony and unity Germany had failed to attain with her satellites. It was a splendid indication of the future. . , . The strongest interest had now switched inevitably from Italy to the new battle line in Normandy, he said. Indeed, he found that the invasion had been as eagerly awaited by the men in Italy and the news of its start as excitedly welcomed as anywhere else. He felt sure, however, that the people would not forget that the years of hard fighting in the Mediterranean areain Greece, Crete, the desert, and Tunisia—had been an essential prelude to the invasion of France and would be no less an important factor in the ultimate defeat of Germany.