A GRAVE ORDEAL

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25674, 24 October 1944, Page 4

A GRAVE ORDEAL

The extent of the toll of human life in English cities that was exacted by the Germans in the period four years ago when their air fleets were making their daily raids upon Great Britain is only now being revealed. Within the last week or two we have been informed by cable of the casualties suffered by the civil populations of such cities as Coventry, Hull, Bristol, Plymouth, Manchester", Southampton, and Portsmouth. The experience which they had was that also of large numbers of other centres. There was no place within his & range which can be said to have wholly escaped the attention of the enemy. The fury of his attack was directed specially against London, for it presented a target that, from the Germans’ point of view, peculiarly invited attack, and as we know the casualties that were inflicted on her people were grievously heavy. But the figures that are now, for the first time, being published, showing the casualties that were reported from the provincial cities, leave us in no doubt about the gravity of the ordeal to which they had to submit. When the statistics have been completed they will unquestionably make it clear that the number of civilians killed—wholly irrespective of the injured—in Great Britain totally outside the London area was not less than the total amount of the casualties that would be suffered in a major battle. And unfortunately a considerable proportion of the number of dead consisted of women and children. It was with a deliberate purpose that the Nazis carried out their policy of the indiscriminate killing of non-combatants. They counted upon this policy opening up a short way to the achievement of a victory that would involve the humiliation of Great Britain. And there was a time when, if they had only known it and they had pushed the advantages they had secured, victory actually lay within their grasp. “Even to-day,” the

London weekly paper, the Spectator, says, “we hardly realise in what extremity we stood in those dark months of 1940, when everything on the Allied side except the British Commonwealth had collapsed, and when a leader, who confessed that he found such isolation ‘ rather inspiring,’ conveyed the inspiration to his countrymen so effectively that in the traditional spirit of their race they never realised for a moment that by every military canon they were beaten.” It was a time that called for supreme leadership if Britain and the British Empire were to be saved. As has happened before, the hour produced the man whose very appearance, it has been said, was a symbol of the nation, and who expressed its spirit in a few sentences, simple but sublime. “If ever,” the Spectator went on to say, “confidence in victory engendered victory it was in those dark days, though it is just to say that but for Hitler’s madness in invading Russia and declaring war on the United States we would be living through such dark days still.” The memory of those days will never be effaced from the minds of those who lived through them, and their fortitude will be a source of pride on the part of British peoples everywhere throughout the world when the events of that eventful time are recalled.