NOTES AND COMMENTS

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 200, 22 May 1944, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Many people will have learned with pleasure that there is every-pros-pect of some of the children’s health camps, which had been required for military purposes, being restored to their former use. Those who have had an opportunity to study the work of the health camps realize that they can do a wonderful work for the benefit of the children. They build up the resistance of the child to disease, and do much to establish what is termed the optimum of 'health. It is not enough to say that freedom from disease, or from liability to common ailments, constitutes good health. The young people should have an abundance of energy and interests. In some way a stay in a health camp seems admirably fitted to ensure those things, and, incidentally, the knowledge that the children are under expert control, in health-giving conditions, must take a load of anxiety from the minds of many parents. The Dominion made a step forward when it decided that the national memorial to King George V should take the form of children’s camps, and although possibly the use of these establishments for urgent military requirements could not have been avoided, the sooner they are restored to their original purpose the better it will be for the children and so for the Dominion as a whole.

Apparently many people regard the fighting in and about Cnssino as being in some way a phase of the campaign in the Naples zone. The maps show that the town of Cassino is nearly half-way between Naples and Rome, and with Allied forces pushing on rapidly beyond the fallen stronghold they must be practically midway between the two cities. The units fighting beyond Cassino are actually further north than those holding Anzio, the base of the big beach-head. Another 15 miles, approximately, and they will be in the old province of Roma and little more than 50 miles in a direct line from the Italian capital. All the way the country is admirably suited for purposes of defence, but there can be no doubt that Cassino was the point to which the Germans had given the greatest attention. They now claim that they held up the Allied advance for two months there, but that can hardly give the civil population in the Reich any cause for satisfaction. The Nazis have been making similar claims ever since they failed to hold up the advance at El Alamein, a line about as far from Cairo as Cassino is from Rome. The hard fact is that one of the enemy’s strongest, and most carefully prepared positions has been smashed, and the Allies have shown that in the mountains, as in the desert, they can put in the field units capable of successfully doing the unexpected.

Servicewomen are employed in the forward areas of the fighting fronts to a greater extent than is perhaps realized. The fact, notes a writer in the “N.Z.E.F. Times" just to hand, is one of the most remarkable features of this war. “Today,” he says, “one may see on the Fifth Army Front women driving staff-cars and ambulances well within range of the enemy guns. A little further back they function as orderly room clerks, switchboard operators and hospital personnel.” On the New Zealand front in Italy the most advanced toward the fighting line was “a* group of eight nursing sisters attached to a casualty clearing station behind Cassino.” New Zealand readers will realize from the reports of the recent fighting in this area, that these nursing sisters were carrying on In one of the hottest zones of the fighting. Furthermore, as this writer points out, they had to live under canvas all through the atrocious weather conditions that prevailed, with accompanying problems of drainage, sanitation, washing, drying and airing of clothing and bedding which had to Im solved somehow. Such heroic service is in the highest traditions of the Army Nursing Service, well meriting the tribute paid in the soldiers’ journal, z