ALLIED NATIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 May 1940, Page 5

ALLIED NATIONS

UNITED IN RESOLVE TO CONQUER

BRITISH MINISTER’S BROADCAST GERMAN EFFORT BOUND TO WEAKEN. HITLER’S TACTICS ANALYSED. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, May 2G. The Minister of Information, Mr Duff Cooper, making a broadcast speech in French to France on Sunday night, said that fierce and terrible as the sudden onslaught had proved itself, they knew that once that onslaught had been repulsed the strength of Germany would diminish day by day and the Allied strength would increase...

“In this last week both our peoples have demonstrated in different ways a firm determination to conquer. French workers have spontaneously offered to work longer hours and that contribution toward the great national effort may be yet greater. “Here in England we have passed through Parliament a Bill which puts the whole national resources at the disposal of the Government. We have thrown into the common stock not only all the property of the rich, but also the legal rights of the people—rights which we have fought hard to obtain through many centuries —for the duration of the war. All we have, all we love, our liberties as well as our lives, have been freely handed over to the State. And the Bill which enacted this great revolution was passed through Parliament without a single dissentient voice.”

The Minister analysed Hitler’s policy as originally an effort to keep friends with England while he destroyed France. Finding that unsuccessful he decided to try the opposite and destroy England first. “Even now I am told, he is dropping pamphlets upon Paris urging the French people to make peace at the expense of England. “We in Great Britain have not the slightest fear that those efforts will succeed. The French people are as loyal as they are wise. They know as we do for what the two nations are fighting. Everything is at stake. We are fighting not for possessions, power or prestige. We are fighting for our independence, liberty and existence. We are 'fighting that the soil of France may still belong .to Frenchmen and that the soil of Great Britain may still belong to the men who live on it. The soil of France is only less sacred to us than, our own because so many of our best and bravest are buried within it who died fighting for our common cause. “United we are bound to conquer; separated we might be destroyed. All Germany’s efforts are now centred upon effecting that separation. She may offer specious terms, but you know as well as we do that Germany has never kept’" the 'terms of any .treaty, .and once she had rendered France powerless she would not be content till she had reduced the French people to slavery as she has reduced the Poles. Germany has greater reason for hating France than for hating Poland, and any agreement France made with Germany today would mean the selling into slavery of French people. ____________