South Yorkshire Times, October 30th 1943
Home Again
Many homes, not a few in South Yorkshire itself, have been blessed this week by the return of the three shiploads of repatriated prisoners. The exchange has provided a momentary lightening of the dark horizon of war, and an incalculable easing of the anxieties of many now able to greet once more those they had loved long since and lost awhile. These prisoners are representative of all the major campaigns of the war, Norway, Dunkirk and the African battles, not to mention the air war and the ceaseless struggle at sea. So the men number among them those who must have yearned for home through four long years, as well as others whose term of captivity has been briefer, but perhaps harder through personal pain and anguish borne perforce in lonely exile. Britain takes them all to her heart, with equal pride and compassion. They are a token force of that all-too large army of prisoners who, having nobly fought their country’s battles, have their health but must still await their freedom. In good time, and in reasonably quick time we hope, these gallant men will be liberated, not through the measured medium of exchange, but by force of Allied arms, In the meantime they share foremost place in our memory with the repatriated men now in our midst again, Next to those who have given their lives for the democratic ideal, these others who have forfeited precious years of their young manhood have a primary claim on the national conscience.
This claim, established in the heat of battle, has been strengthened in the less spectacular but equally trying ordeal of captivity. There was abundant evidence before the return of this week’s repatriated thousands that the morale of British prisoners in Germany was magnificent. We confidently hope it is not less so in Japanese camps. The gay jaunty courage of the men who marched or were carried down the gang planks at Leith and Liverpool, many of them maimed and blinded, should be a tonic to the country that bred them. Their high spirits in the Swedish port, where their ships lay berthed near vessels carrying home-bound Nazis, were in striking contrast to the glum suspicion which overhung their German counterparts. They bring strange tales of dwindling German confidence; guards who bade them an almost envious farewell. So much for Germany. And now what of their own country, to which some of them come almost as strangers? A great deal has happened in the last few years. Britain carries scars, but there is a new note from her industrial dynamo. It hums with a tone both powerful and purposeful, a tone of which the drone of our bombers must have given our temporary exiles some conception. In the long days of boredom and separation we can be sure they sustained themselves with the thought of what Britain was and what she was not. Now they are to find how much was idealism; how much reality. It remains to mark this happy restoration with an honest recognition of imperfections, and renewed determination to eradicate them and make ourselves worthy of these fine sons who have undergone and are undergoing so much for us.