BASES LEASED TO U.S.A.

Southland Times, Issue 24227, 10 September 1940, Page 7

BASES LEASED TO U.S.A.

Strategic Importance Emphasized

COMMON INTERESTS OF NATIONS (British Official Wireless) (Received September 9, 6.30 p.m.) RUGBY, September 8. The strategic importance to the defence of common interests afforded by the naval aid air bases leased by Britain to the United States will be appreciated when it is realized how effective is the control which can he exercised by adequate naval and air forces stationed at the places specified in the agreement. Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua and British Guiana form a complete strategic chain.

Newfoundland lies athwart the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the river of the same name, which provides an outlet for a vast series of inland waters comprising Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan and Superior. With connecting canals and rivers they extend for nearly 500 miles into the interior of Canada in one line of continuous-navi-gation inland. Michigan, with a length of 316 miles, lies wholly in the United States, otherwise the international boundary passes through the centres and together they furnish for seven months in the year an inlet into the Atlantic from the heart of western United States and Canada. Bermuda consists of a cluster of about 100 small islands, some 16 of which are inhabited, about 580 miles from the nearest point of the American coast and 730 miles from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Bermuda has long been a British naval base. Lying on the flanks of important trade routes between Britain, Canada and the United States on the one hand and on the other the ocean highways leading to the West Indies and the Panama Canal, the islands’ strategic importance is clear. ENTRANCES COVERED Further south the Bahamas cover the Florida Channel and the Windward Passage, the northern entrances from the Greater Antilles into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. Naval and air bases in Cuba and San Domingo are already available to the United States, while Porto Rico and some smaller islands around it guarding the 150 miles “Mona Passage” into the Caribbean are American possessions. Jamaica, however, some 200 miles south-west of the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba, is less than 600 miles from the Panama Canal and excellently situated to assist in its seaward defence. Antigua and St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles, and Trinidad cover the western approaches to the Panama Canal, roughly 1300 miles away, together with the Dutch islands of Curacao and Aruba, which are important because of their oil supplies obtained from Maraccaibo, in • Venezuela. The chain of American defences will be completed by a naval and air base to be established near Georgetown, in

British Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, about 350 miles from Trinidad.

Well may it be said that the agreement is a matter for congratulation. It has been welcomed all over the British Empire as a substantial sign of the friendship and sympathetic interest which exist between the two great English-speaking democracies of the modern world. BRITISH PRESS COMMENT Under such headings as “A Happy Agreement,” ‘'Splendid Barter,” “Fair Exchange” weekly journals print considered comment on the lease of the sites for bases and the transfer of destroyers. The New Statesman says that it is not a business deal but an imaginative agreement born of the consciousness of the common cause. Each nation recognizes that now and in the future it needs and will need the other.

Noting that the free lease of the sites is for 99 years, it says: “As we read them they imply for three generations a parallelism in British and American foreign policy. We are brothers in arms in war as

in peace for centuries to come.”

The mutual benefits of the arrangement are emphasized by both The Spectator and Time and Tide. The former writes that a striking feature of the arrangement indeed is that each party benefits as much by what it gives as by what it gets, and it argues that that kind of accord is only possible between two governments which start on terms of unclouded friendship and repose complete confidence in one another. The Economist observes that the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war has been celebrated by something far more effective than oratory. The greatest benefit of the arrangements in the opinion of this journal is the evidence it gives of this way in which Britain and America "complement each other’s defensive—of the manner in "which' events have brought clearer insight on both sides of the Atlantic. There could not be a clearer example of reciprocity than this exchange.