COMMENTS-21-1

Sir,

The opening of the “not far distant” Second Front is the occasion for a timely appeal from Mr. Arthur Deakin, acting general secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union. It is timely because it may come as a reminder to many that a modern army would get nowhere without motor transport, and the thousands of peace-time motorists and lorry drivers who are running it.

The great work which British railways have done in the movement of troops and equipment has been brought home to most of us in the inevitable personal inconveniences of train travel in war-time. Even here, as the railways’ job continues for the European invasion, hundreds of motor drivers are now being mobilised to co-operate in long-distance work on this side of the English Channel.

The actual landing on the Continent would, of course, be futile unless our armies took with them motor transport of the kind that brought the Eighth Army like clockwork from El Alamein to Tunis. Every 24 hours each of these armoured divisions which open up the Second Front will use 70,000 gallons of petrol ; will fire 350 tons of ammunition ; will eat 120 tons of food.

Let us remember, then, those whom the people at borne arc too apt to forget, the officers and men of the Royal Army Service Corps, those motorists and lorry drivers of other days, whose task it will be to deliver, exactly on time, all that petrol, ammunition, and food from the depots to the fighting units advancing towards the Rhine. I am, Yours, etc.,

Rottingdean. STRATIISPEY. [From which it would seem that motorists have a very firm friend in Lord Strathspey.—En.]