Men in Ships

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 208, 18 June 1943, Page 3

Men in Ships

HE fact that this is Navy Week in the Loan campaign means that our efforts to raise money for the prosecution of the war are tied up for seven days with the exploits of men in ships. Here and here the navy helped us; how much can we help in return? But it is also an opportunity to remember the thousands of men in ships whom it is easy, to forget but without whom we could not fight for a week. It would not be correct, or nearly correct, to say that when we talk about the navy we forget the merchant marine, and that when the merchant marine comes to our minds we think chiefly of officers and engineers and wireless operators and seldom of firemen and greasers and stewards and deck-hands. We do not forget those others, but if we are not careful we remember them much as we remember the sap in the wood when we hang over a full-blown rose. Their work is vital, but it is secondary, hidden, and often silent, and it is human nature to applaud the spectacular. Fortunately, this will probably be the last war in which the navy and the merchant marine will remain two services. Even the admirals are ashamed of the line so often drawn between the ratings on a war-ship and the crew of a tramp or tanker-a line that makes heroes of one, with their own hospitals and pensions, and an "also served" host of the others from youth to age and from the fo’c’s’le to the Old Men’s Home. No one has spoken more hotly against this than Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, a recent Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, who has said on public platforms and from his place in the Lords that he has felt dishonoured and disgraced to see merchant seamen rescued by the navy and taken to port wondering where to go for shelter and hospital treatment and not eligible for admission to the hospitals and barracks of their saviours. It is not the navy’s fault, and it is not wholly the fault of any Government; but it must disappear. Meanwhile let us keep all these unsung warriors as safe as our pockets and bank accounts can make them this week.