A LAND OF PLENTY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 71, Issue 6140, 24 September 1945, Page 4

A LAND OF PLENTY

AMPLE FOOD IN INDIA ARMY OFFICER’S OPINION After 14 months at Delhi as an engineer on staff duties at G.H.Q., Delhi, Captain I. H. Penrose, New Zealand Engineers, Dunedin, returned to the Dominion in the hospital ship Empire Clyde last week. Captain Pehrose’s duties were concerned with supplies for the India and Burma commands, and entailed continued rounds of Indian factories to promote the fullest production of army requirements. 4 ‘There is plenty of everything in the food line in India,” he says. “In a newspaper in Colombo which was published a day or so before I joined the ship I saw advertised for sale for civilian use Australian lamb, pork, mutton, veal, beef and poultry, and all kinds of tinned fruit and sardines and such things as Marmite could be obtained without the slightest difficulty.” Captain Penrose is wearing the staff shoulder flash of the Indian Army, a gold star on a red and blue square. “The Star of India, rising from a sea

of ink into a sky of red tape,” is a popular description of the flash, he says. New Zealand personnel waiting for •repatriation in India are having a bad time, he said. AH the transports coming from the Middle East were crammed to the rails, and there were some very long waits. He waited four months, and one New Zealand man who travelled from Colombo to Fremantle on the ship had* waited for eight. There had been at least one case of a nine-months’ wait.