This is an entry in a year-long project to post-blog the demobilisation experience for British servicemen at the end of the Second World War. See here for an introduction to the project and here for a brief overview of the demobilisation process.
Protests in Sydney accompanied the departure yesterday of the former Japanese destroyer Yuizuki after it was revealed that she was carrying over 1,200 persons in far from adequate living conditions, reports the Times. The Yuizuki's mission is to repatriate a large number of Japanese prisoners of war and Formosan and Filipino civilian internees. Her departure from Sydney was delayed for five hours while Australian Army officers protested about the conditions on board the packed vessel. The ship's complement includes over one hundred children and fifteen stretcher cases, including two pregnant women. Yuizuki, which is 440 feet long, would normally carry a crew of 263. Her first port of call will be Finschafen, New Guinea, where she will stop for water.
The Times also reflects on a new White Paper outlining revised pay rates for officers in the fighting services, which is meant to simplify and streamline compensation and provide more attractive opportunities for regular service. The paper's concern is less with the details of pay than with continuing discrepancies in the recruitment styles of the different services:
The Navy, while granting a proportion of commissions to men of the lower deck, is to rely for its future officers chiefly on naval cadets entered through the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth between the ages of thirteen and fourteen ... the Army is to take its officers almost exclusively from the ranks, while the Royal Air Force system is to be something between the two with a leaning towards that of the Army. The anomily that a principle considered of sufficient value to be applied universally in the Army finds no place in the organization adopted by the Navy certainly seems to call for further elucidation.
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