BRITAIN’S TASK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 January 1940, Page 6

BRITAIN’S TASK

SURVEY BY MR CHURCHILL

PREPARATIONS IO MEET ANY CONTINGENCY.

ROYAL NAVY'S GREAT EFFORT

(British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, January 27.

Speaking at Manchester this afternoon, the First Lord of the Admiralty. Mr Winston Churchill, stated that when the war began against the world's greatest military and air Power most people expected that British cities would very soon be torn and charred by explosion and fire.

Ke continued: "1 know nothing more remarkable in our long history than the willingness to encounter the unknown and face and endure whatever might be coming to us which was shown in September by the whole mass of the people of this island in discharge of what they felt sure was. their duty. "There never before was a war which seemed so likely to carry its terrors at once into every home. There never before was a war into which the whole people entered with the same united conviction that, God helping, they could do no other.” The war, Mr Churchill said, was neither planned nor entered into by Government, class, or party. On the contrary, the Government laboured' to the very end for peace. During the last days the British people’s only fear .was that, weighed down by its responsibilities, the Government might fail to rise to the height of the occasion. They did not fail, and the Prime Minister led one great body into .the struggle from which there was no turning back.

RIGHT WILL WIN "We cannot tell what the course of the struggle will be or into what regions it will carry us, how long it will last or who will fall by the way.” he commented. "But w'e are sure that in the end the right will win and freedom will not be trampled down, that truer progress will open and a broader justice will reign. "We are determined to play our part worthily and faithfully and to the end."

The naval war had opened at full pitch from the very first, Mr Churchill said. The enemy had made and still was making most desperate efforts to destroy the seaborne commerce by which Britain lived and starve her into submission. To date the British Navy had not failed. "Continual losses there have been, and continual losses there will be. When’you remember we have hundreds of warships always running risks upon the sea to protect the thousands ot British and neutral merchant ships spread about the vast oepan spaces of the globe or crowding into our island gateways you will, I am sure, realise that we shall have to pay a relentless toll for the mastery of the seas.” But so far, marked success had attended the naval effort and the. German trade shipping had been sunk or driven from the seas, he continued. German imports of vita! war materials had been decisively curtailed. German exports were practically cut off.

The pocket-battleship Admiral Graf Spec had been sunk in a brilliant action. The first attack of file U-boats had been mastered and deadly losses inflicted. Al: least half the U-boats with which the enemy began the war had been destroyed and * Germany’s new building had so far fallen short of the original estimates by the British naval authorities.

NEW MINING MENACE

While the new mining menace was doubtless severe and costly to meet, “we think that our science is superior in several important ways to that of the enemy," and it was believed that this threat, too, would be brought under control.

“Let no one, therefore, be disheartened when -reading the daily losses," Mr Churchill urged. “Let all remember that at the end of five months of vehement naval war it is 500 to one against any ship which obeys the Admiralty instructions and joins a British convey being sunk, and that out of nearly 7500 ships convoyed only 15 have been lost, that the volume of imports and exports is now steadily increasing, that by the ships captured and the ships built we have almost made good the losses we have suli’ercd, and that very important reinforcements are approaching both for our Navy and our merchant shipping to meet the new dangers and new assaults which may come upon us in tiie future."

Mr Churchill also briefly reviewed the war in the air. He asked, regarding the fact that no large-scale aciial attack has yet been launched upon the United Kingdom, was it because the Nazis were saving up for some orgy of Rightfulness soon to come, er was it because they dreaded the superior quality of Britain’s lighting aircraft. or was it because they feared the counter-stroke by Brilain’s powerful bomber;'.? AIR POLICY ivh- Churchill answered that no one could say lor certain. But iliere was one tiling. lie declared, and "this was a certainty, it was the rightness of the Allied policy of refraining from commencing tile aerial war on areas behind the lines and of demonstrating tile power of their air forces solely by dropping leallets all over Germany. "We must not indefinitely continue merely to await blows at us. Air Churchill said. "We hope a day will come when we will hand over that job to Hiller—when lie will be wondering where he is going to be struck next. "He boasts lie has 30.n00.000 under his rod. but 20.000.000 of them are held down forcibly. We are 85.000.000 in tile homelands alone and 20.000.000 in the Dominions, whose armies arc hastening to the battlefront.

"Our inexhaustible forces will steadily and surely bear down toe evil thing whose wickedness has shadowed mankind arid seeks to bar its lorwaid march "