BACK HOME

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 32, Issue 3290, 19 July 1943, Page 7

BACK HOME

JOHNNY NEW ZEALAND WELC OME DE SE R VED gallant dominion men [By Robin Miller, former Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F., Middle East.] Johnny New Zealand has come marching home again. Basking in the radiant fame of the finest division of the great Sth Army, he is almost a mythical figure, almost a demi-god—until you meet him. Then he is no longer a myth nor a demigod, but just . . . Johnny New Zealand. However older, wiser and broader in his outlook the war may have made him, he is basically the same old Johnny who went away. After his years of active service on foreign soil, no more gladdening sight ever lay before his eyes than that of his own homeland, growing green and real out of the haze ahead of the ship that brought him home. . And yet deep in his heart he knows that this cannot be his ultimate homecoming, that his place cannot be permanently at home until the war is won. In a month of two that hidden

feeling will break through the all-too-transient froth of joyous reunion and forgetful celebration, and Johnny will be impatient to rejoin “the boys'’ and the division. Three Years of War Over For this interim homecoming there could not be a better time than the present. Britain’s “retreat to victory” at last is ended; it was stopped and turned at El Alamein. The strange, confusing first three y<sars of the war are over; the years of black tragedy and frustration and disappointment, of battles again relentless time and hopeless odds, of retreat after retreat after retreat. Through these years there could be no question of a fighting man taking a prolonged holiday. There was a desperate urgency about it all that rooted him to the spot He was like the little Dutch boy with his hand stopping the leak in the dyke, acutely aware that to desert his post would mean a tragedy far greater than the loss of his own life. The flush of victory couud be the only occasion for a home-coming holiday—not the hushed shadow of a military defeat, no matter how high a level qf gftllantry and self-sacrifice even a defeat might produce. Johnny New Zeeland comes home in that flush of victory. The thrill cf North Africa still echoes around the world. It is fresh and real in every mind as P-ltain’s first decisive mlPter TT sn-cess. and than rl.nt ft--' »the turning point in the war, the vin-

d’cation of one after another of th ise ugly days that went before it And because of it, New Zealand now can give her Johnny, without a twinge of conscience, the hero’s welcome he deserves.