NOTES AND COMMENTS

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 30, 30 October 1942, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

British people do not need to be argued into the belief that sea-power is an indispensable requirement of their safety and. security in all parts of the Empire. Their faith In the Navy is a tradition, inherited from the days of Drake and the Armada, Nelson and Trafalgar. That faith has been strengthened by their experience of the last war and what they have been told of the work of the Navy in the present one. This conflict, as Admiral Stark, Commander-in-Chief of the United States naval forces in European waters, declares, has provided the most impressive demonstration of seapower in history. When the full tale of naval service and achievement is unfolded after the war the significance of this statement will be strikingly revealed. There are experts today, notably America’s well-known aeronautical authority, Major Seversky, who advance the claim that ultimately air-power will be the sole winning factor in modern warfare. But there is yet no evidence to support his thesis that air-power alone, however destructive and harassing to an enemy, could keep long-distance sea lanes open and transport supplies in quantity sufficient to maintain large armies remote from their home bases, and that, says Admiral Stark in a graceful compliment to Britain, is what the Royal Navy lias done. “For two and a half years,” he says, “the British Navy, single-handed, had kept open the road to victory for our way of life against tyranny.”

Czechoslovakia, which being as a sovereign republic after the last war, was probably the first of the succession States in Europe to become thoroughly organized for political, social, and economic development, achieving noteworthy results in all three departments under the sagacious direction of her first President, Professor Masaryk. She was also the first to experience the shocks of Hitler’s programme of aggression in Europe after Mussolini’s betrayal of Austria to the Germans. But although the Czechs have seen their country overrun and pillaged, their democratic institutions destroyed, their fellow-citizens cruelly and callously butchered by thousands under the Nazi regime, they have never admitted defeat. With the patience, perseverance and courage that characterized the work of their leaders for the emancipation of the country from the Teutonic yoke during the last war, the Czech people are waiting, watching, and unobtrusively working for the day of their release from Nazi tyranny and the re-establishment of their free institutions. In every part of the world where Czechs in exile are able to foregather, and no doubt in covert meeting-places in their own country, the celebration this week of the 24th anniversary of the founding of the republic has -been marked, as it was marked in Wellington on Wednesday, by an impressive re-emphnsis of Czech determination to work and fight with the United Nations for the destruction of Hitlerism, and the triumphant vindication of liberty and self-government.