EXHIBIT A

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 August 1942, Page 4

EXHIBIT A

IN FAR EAST SHOW CASE OF TRAGEDIES FRENCH INDO-CHINA UNHAPPY AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE. GREAT KINDNESS SHOWN TO AUSTRALIANS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 11.20 a.m.) NEW YORK, August 19. How the French people are keeping thousands of Australian prisoners of war alive at Saigon is told by Mr Reiman Morin, formerly an Associated Press correspondent in the Far East, in a dispatch from the Gripsholm, a diplomatic exchange liner. Mr Morin says: “French Indo-China is Exhibit A in the Far Eastern show case of tragedies. The first white colony in the Orient to fall through a combination of bluff and Axis pressure on Vichy, it has become Japan’s most important land base. The French stay there because they cannot get away. French shipping has been commandeered entirely by the Japanese. The French people are merely existing and go through the motions of living in the bitter knowledge that their work helps the Japanese conqueror. Yet, wherever they can, the French are still fighting—that is 90 per cent of the mass. You can draw a sharp distinction between them and their Government, with its hordes of petty functionaries. In the first three months, two Japanese ammunition dumps were blown into the sky by bullets fired at night. The Hanoi-Sai-gon Railway has been wrecked three times. “Several thousand Australian prisoners of war are concentrated at the Saigon docks alone. The Japanese have forbidden all communication with them; yet the French are literally keeping them alive, smuggling goods, medical supplies and tobacco through fences at night.”