FIRST PHASE OF WAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 January 1940, Page 5

FIRST PHASE OF WAR

FADING NAZI HOPES PROGRESSIVE AWAKENING FOR HITLER. RALLY OF THE EMPIRE. RUGBY, December 30. Writing on the 119th day of the war and on the eve of the New Year, the “Daily Telegraph” reviews the war’s first phase and looks ahead. The first events, it states, have differed from the anticipation. Nevertheless, “before long we may be fighting a strenuous air campaign, but the four months of testing time has given us no reason to fear the quality of the German machines or pilots, and each day that passes brings up nearer to attainment of the power to command the air.” “Hitler boasted that Britain was no longer an island, yet his navy has been as impotent as his air force to close our seaways,” the newspaper remarks. “In a campaign of reckless brutality against British and neutral shipping the German submarine service has again earned the detestation of the world, but its power of destruction has been so checked by the Allied navies that the tide of the U-boat war flows steadily and strongly in our favour. “The disappointments and humiliations of the naval war appear to have made Hitlerism hopeless of any future on the seas No other explanation accounts for the policy of destruction by the scuttling of German ships in safe neutral harbours.” “The Daily Telegraph’ thinks it must at last be dawning on Herr Hitler that he has challenged a Britain which never before in her history has been so united in taking up arms. Moreover “the Empire has rallied to the common effort with more than loyalty—with a conviction that liberty in every Do-, minion and colony is threatened by Hitlerism. “We have worked out such close concord with • France as to multiply the strength of each country.”