SHORES ARE WELL FORTIFIED

Southland Times, Issue 24230, 13 September 1940, Page 5

SHORES ARE WELL FORTIFIED

“Our fleets and flotillas are very powerful and numerous,” said the Prime Minister. “Our Air Force is at the highest strength it has ever reached and it is conscious of its proved superiority—not indeed in numbers, but in men and machines. “Our shores are well fortified and strongly manned and behind them, ready to attack the invaders, we have a far larger and better equipped mobile army than we have ever had before. Besides this we have more than 1,500,000 men of the Home Guard who are just as much soldiers of the regular army in Status as are the Grenadier Guards and who are determined to fight for every inch of ground in every village and in every street. It is with devout, but sure, confidence that I say: ‘Let God defend the right.’ PART OF HITLER’S PLANS

“These cruel, wanton and indiscriminate bombings of London are of course part of Hitler’s invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians and women and children, to terrorize and cow the people of this mighty imperial city and make them a burden of anxiety to the Government. Thus he hopes to distract our attention unduly from the ferocious onslaught he is preparing. Little does he know the spirit of the British nation or the tough fibre of the Londoners whose forebears played a leading part in establishing parliamentary institutions and who have been bred to value freedom faxabove their lives.

“This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame has now resolved to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.

“What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts here and all over the world which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burned out of Europe and until the Old World and the New can join hands to rebuild the temples of man’s freedom and man s honour upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.

“This is the time for everyone to stand together and to hold firm as they are doing. “I express my admiration for the exemplary manner in which all the Air Raid Precautions' services in London are being discharged, especially the fire brigade, service, whose work has been so heavy and also so dangerous. FORTITUDE OF CITIZENS “All the world that is still free marvels at the composure and the fortitude with w'hich the citizens of London are facing and surmounting the great ordeal to which they have been subjected, an ordeal the end or the severity of which cannot yet be, foreseen.

“It is a message of good cheer to our fighting forces on the seas, in the air and in our waiting armies in all their posts and stations that we have a people who will not. flinch or weary of the struggle, hard and protracted though it will be. It is a message of good cheer to them that we shall rather draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival and of a victory won aot only for oui' own time but for the long and better days that are to come.”

REPORT OF GERMAN PRECAUTIONS

LONDON, September 11.

Diplomats in Washington report that Germany has placed more than 1,000,000 troops in German or German occupied territory fronting the Russian frontiers as a precaution to forestall a Soviet coup during the blitzkrieg against Britain.

The British United Press correspondent on the German frontier learns that Italian pilots are being transferred to Germany as a result of a shortage of German pilots. September 16 is now mentioned as the vital date in the German programme. The Bucharest correspondent of Reuters News Agency interviewed a traveller who declared that German officials had already begun to despair about the issue of the war. Their attitude had altered from extreme cocksureness and arrogance to anxiety and uncertainty.