ADMITTED BY WAR SECRETARY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 June 1940, Page 6

ADMITTED BY WAR SECRETARY

But Enemy Fails to Achieve Main Object ATTEMPT TO ENVELOP ALLIES DEFEATED BRITISH TROOPS A BODY OF SEASONED VETERANS (By Telegraph.—-Press Association.—Copyright.) (Received. This Day, .11.00 a.m.) LONDON, June 2. Broadcasting to the world, the Secretary for War (Air Anthony Eden) said: “Germany has made a great strategic gain—the loss to us in equipment and material has been heavy. But there is now another side to this picture. The bulk of the British Expeditionary Force has been saved, and, quite apart from what the French have done for their own forces, we have been able to bring tens of thousands of our French Allies off with us at Dunkirk. Nor is the effort ended. Four days ago, not one of us would have dared to hope that the isolated Allied armies would have fought their way through the bottleneck to the coast. It is the spirit of the B.E.F. that has won through. Those men have marched a hundred miles. They have fought countless actions with an enemy that hemmed them in and pressed upon them from three sides. The German High Command proudly announced that they were surrounded. They have fought their way out. Thanks io the magnificent and* untiring co-operation of the Allied navies and air forces we have been able to embark more than four-fifths of that B.E.F. which the Germans claimed to have surrounded. “The Germans, despite the huge losses which we know them to have suffered, have failed in their main object—to surround and annihilate the Allied armies in the porth. The British Expeditionary Force still exists, not as a handful of fugitives, but as a body of seasoned veterans.”