The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1940. A HUNDRED RAIDS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 224, 20 September 1940, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1940. A HUNDRED RAIDS.

For the cause that lacks assistance. For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that toe can do.

London had its hundredth air-raid alarm the other day. The hundred have occurred nearly all. within about five .weeks. What that means to a civilian population we who have never heard a warning siren, still less the sound and sight of exploding bombs, cannot easily imagine. What we do know —and it was not known before—is that a population can be subjected to all manner of air attacks of great violence for a period of many weeks, and still preserve its spirit unbroken. Great cities have been bombed before. Madrid, Barcelona, Warsaw, Paris and Rotterdam in turn suffered the onslaught of the air weapon, but none of them knew an onslaught either so intense or so prolonged as that which London has endured and is still enduring. All of them suecumbed, though not to air attack alone. The spirit of Paris, or of its rulers, began to crumble after one severe raid. But London holds out, and will hold out. Why J The obvious reason is that it is better defended than any of the others. The R.A.F. fighter force has no peer, nor has the anti-aircraft barrage been approached in intensity anywhere. But when this superiority of physical defences has been granted and allowed for, something more is needed to explain the resistance which London offers to the savage assaults of the Nazi bombers. It ean be explained only by the fact that Mr. Churchill correctly interpreted the character and mind of the British people when he declared that even jf London were laid in ruins Britain would not capitulate.

The courage of that declaration can be appreciated better now than when it was made. Mr. Churchill and his advisers then knew—but the people could not know=-what lay ahead of them. They had read of the experience of Rotterdam, they had no illusions as to the depths of infamy which Hitter's bombers would plumb if they got their but they did not know the reality. They had yet to experience it. And now they have experienced it, and even though they know that in all probability there is worse to come, in the ne*t week or ten days, they are no less resolute. To say that they are "making history" is to use a phrase paltry in the circumstances. They ere altering the course of the war, and helping , to determine its outcome. For the invasion of England was to have been in mid4«gust, by which time London, presumably, wan to have been reduced to ruins. The war wee t© have been eye? by the, autumn—so Hitler had promised hia people. Now it is past the middle of geptember, and Hitler haa less reason for confidence bow than he had when the bombing of London began. He has killed thousands of people, and torn the face of London, and he still has the vast and. perilous project of invasion all ahead of him.