SALUTE TO COURAGE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24405, 17 September 1940, Page 6

SALUTE TO COURAGE

There will have to be a book compiled when this war has been won — we might tentatively call it an anthology of heroism—which will be a record of civilian behaviour under the most extraordinary conditions produced by war or other calamity in the world’s history. The people of Great Britain, in greater or less degree, have for months now been literally in the firing line. Civilian and military organisations are actually merged in the supreme task of defending the British Isles against attack from the air and the everpresent menace of invasion. Civilian work goes on as usual when it is not interrupted by German air raids. But when those occur, as they are occurring by day and by night over London and its environs and over other parts of the country, the army of A.R.P. in its thousands moves willingly to the performance of abnormal duties as though these were actually become part of the routine of a normal day. We have in mind particularly, as an example of the type of conduct of which, in the literature of heroism, there will surely be preserved an imperishable record, the operation performed by units of the Bomb Disposal Squad detailed to remove the time bomb that threatened the total destruction of St. Paul’s Cathedral. This monstrous missile, eight feet in length and weighing about a ton. was located by the salvagers at a depth of 27 feet under the road’s surface, after gas had been encountered and fire overcome as the result of a burst main. It had to be completely excavated, its bulk raised on to a lorry by means of lifting apparatus, and then driven some miles out of London, along roads cleared of all other traffic, to the disposal area, where it was exploded according to plan, and where it made a crater in which an average large building could have been buried. That is a plain recital of the facts, as any member of the squad concerned might have given them. But he would be a dullard indeed who could not fill in the gaps for himself, bringing the story to life in the grim yet magnificently stirring atmosphere of its setting. If the great Cathedral was to be saved the bomb had to be.removed. Removed. therefore, it was, though none who accepted the task knew when its frightful energy might expend itself in catastrophe. Illustrations of courage of this amazing quality are doubtless not uncommon in the lives of the British people today. They show how great crises can transform the ordinary man. and how great causes can command his devotion to the very limits of life itself.