HOME FRONT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 September 1941, Page 6

HOME FRONT

MR HERBERT MORRISON’S ( APPEAL FOR UNREMITTING EFFORT. NEED OF BEING READY FOR WORST. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. September G. Exhorting the civil defence services and munition workers during the present “lull” to maintain the vigour and intensity of their efforts and their high spirits and instant readiness to face air attack, the Home Secretary, Mr Morrison, speaking at Wolverhampton, said: “The summer campaign is drawing to a close. There may be winter campaigns of great importance overseas, but there will be no winter campaigns more important than the war on the home front, and there will be no soldiers whose stout-hearted resistance is more important than the British civilian and the British civil defence worker. We may get bigger attacks and heavier bombs, and it is a good thing to be ready for the worst. “The real war for the final destruction of the Nazis is only just beginning. We have been on the defensive most of the time, but that is not enough. We have got to get on. to the attack. We are up against very big forces. It is essential for us to go about our work in no leisurely spirit and with the feeling that we arc work-, ing under crisis conditions with more crises lying ahead. We must be on our toes, realising that a big and dramatic effort will be needed to get these Nazis down as wo must." Mr Morrison said he was satisfied that good progress was being made in transforming the fire fighting service. It was a tricky and difficult business to reduce 1400 fire brigades to 30 or 40. Last winter it would have been very dangerous under the blitz conditions to have attempted such a big and fundamental transformation.

Speaking of the registration for fire prevention service, he said: “It would have been simpler if we could have made this a full-time service, but the manpower is just not there, and We had to depend on the part-time enthusiastic civic service of all the people in the country.”