LOOKING FORWARD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 January 1940, Page 5

LOOKING FORWARD

WAR SURVEYS IN BRITAIN NOTE OF FIRM CONFIDENCE. GERMAN BRAG AND BLUSTER. SCORNED. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.55 a.m.) RUGBY, January 1. The arrival of a new contingent of the Canadian Active Service Force is the chief news of New Year’s Day in Britain. Correspondents record the heartiness of the welcome accorded the troops and their fine bearing. Mi- Eden’s disclosure that the Canadians were convoyed across the Atlantic by the French Navy, in co-opera-tion with the British Navy, evoked favourable commentin a leading article on the New Year, “The Times” surveys the war position atTts opening. The resolution of the free peoples in Britain and France has been shown to be unflinching. The unity of the British Empire in support of the Mother Country has been found no less unbreakable than in 1914. The Royal Navy, loyally assisted by the French, maintains unimpaired its supremacy over the seas, and the course of the maritime war has already been sufficient to show than even the most unscrupulous use of the weapons of submarine and mine offers no hope of loosening its grip. The combats of individual or comparatively small squadrons in the air 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 the 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 to 21, yielding 219,964 men; 20 to 22, yielding 215,231 men; and 20 to 23, yielding 238,558 men. “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, Germany is already striking blindly at neutrals and herself. Proof of the anxiety of the Fuehrer and his cabal is betrayed in their exhortations for 1940—strange mixtures of brag and’ bluster and whining and apprehension. The unhappy Geman people are told by Hitler himself that his leadership has brought them to the hardest fight in their history—a fight for existence or non-existence.