ALLIES OPEN YEAR IN STRONG POSITION

Manawatu Times, Volume 65, Issue 2, 3 January 1940, Page 8

ALLIES OPEN YEAR IN STRONG POSITION

Time Works Inexorably Against Hitler (British Official Wireless) RUGBY, Jan. 1. In a leading article on the New Year, The Times surveys the war position at its opening. "The resolution of the free peoples in Britain and France,’’ it says, "has been shown to be unflinching. The unity of the British Empire in support of the Mother Country has been found no loss unbreakable than in 1914. Tho Royal Navy, loyally assisted by the French, maintains unimpaired its supremacy over the sca.% and the course of the maritime war has already been sufficient to show that even the most unscrupulous use of the weapons of the tubmarine and mine offers no hope of loosening its grip. “The combats of individual or comparatively small squadrons in the air,’ % adds The Times, “have proved that, man for man and machine for machine, the advantage is decisively with Britain. “The battle on land has yet to be joined, but here also, as civilian Britain reports class by class to the drill sergeants, time moves inexorably against the Germans.” In this connection, all newspapers forecast the early issue of a further Royal Proclamation providing for the registration of several more age groups for service with the armed forces. The age groups so far registered are 20/21, yielding 219,964 men, 20/22, yielding 215,231, and 20/23, yielding 238,558. The Daily Telegraph, which likewise devotes a leader to the New Year, , looks at the picture on the other side of the war fronts. “Under the grip of the blockade,” it says, “Germany is j already striking blindly at the neutrals and herself. Proof of the anxiety of I the Fuhrer and his cabal is betrayed in their exhortations for 1940—strange mixtures of bravado and bluster and whining and apprehension. The unhappy German people are told by Hitler himself that his leadership has brought them to the hardest fight in their history—a fight for their existj ence or non-existence.”