CALLED A MIRACLE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 June 1940, Page 5

CALLED A MIRACLE

DELIVERANCE OF ALLIED

ARMIES

BRITISH PREMIER’S

SURVEY

DEFEAT OF GERMAN AIR FORCE. TASKS THAT LIE IMMEDIATELY AHEAD. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 9.55 a.m.) RUBBY, June 4. The Prime Minister, Mr Winston Churchill, announced in the House of Commons that over 335,000 British and French troops had been brought from the Dunkirk beaches, “out of the jaws of death, back to their native land and to the tasks which lie immediately before them.”

He described it as a miracle of deliverance, achieved by valour, perseverance, perfect discipline and faultless service, by skill and unconquerable vitality. Yet they must not assign to this deliverance the attributes of victory. Wars were not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance which must be noted —there had been a great trial of strength between the British and German air forces and the British had decisively defeated the main strength of the Germans and inflicted a loss of nearly four to one. The British Hurricanes, Spitfires and Deflants had been vindicated and British pilots had been vindicated.

Mr Churchill intimated that in the long series of fierce battles fought on three fronts, the losses incurred by the British exceeded 30,000 killed, wounded and missing. The enemy had had far heavier losses in men. In material, the Allied losses were enormous—nearly a thousand guns and all the transport and armoured vehicles that were with the Army in the north, and it was a finely-equipped Army. These losses would impose a further delay on the expansion of the country's military strength, though there was no reason why they should not overtake them in a few months by the effort at home now begun, the like of which had never been seen in the nation’s history. Thankfulness at the Army’s escape with so many men must not blind them to the fact that what had happened in France and Belgium was a colossal mili-tary-disaster, said Mr Churchill. The French Army had been weakened and the Belgian Army had been lost. A large part of those fortified lines upon which so much faith was reposed had gone and many valuable mining districts and factories had passed into the enemy’s possession. The whole of the Channel ports were in his hands, with all the strategic consequences following from that. The Premier dealt fully with the threat to Britain of invasion, resulting from the setback in Flanders, and gave an assurance that the Government intended to put home defence in the highest state of organisation. With a view to the satisfaction of any anxieties the House might entertain on the latter subject, he intimated the Government’s willingness to hold a secret session next Tuesday.