Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 1940. NAZI TALK FROM VICHY.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 August 1940, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, AUGUST 24, 1940. NAZI TALK FROM VICHY.

A FEW davs ago Marshal Petain was reported as admitting, in an interview with American journalists, that the A ichy Government was under the domination of the. Nazis. Ihe truth of that admission lias been made manifest in a nuinbet of ways, but never more definitely than in a broadcast by 1 . Baudouin, Foreign Minister in the Vichy Government, which was reported yesterday. If the statement made by M. Baudouin had been composed by Dr Goebbels, it could not have adhered more closely to the standards of debased and unscrupulous Nazi propaganda. M. Baudouin was concerned primarily to denounce ;is inhuman the deeison of the British Government to maintain and enforce a strict blockade, not only of Germany, but ol Italy, France and all other countries that have fallen into the German power. For reasons that were stated by Air Churchill in the House of Commons this week, no true and loyal friend of France will condemn or criticise that decision. The Nazis, the British Prime Minister pointed out,

have repeatedly stated that they possess ample food reserves and can feed the captive peoples. .. . The only agencies that can create a famine in any part of Europe during the coming winter will be German exactions or German failure to distribute the supplies they command. Many of the most valuable foods are essential to the manufacture of vital war materials. If the Germans use these commodities to help them bomb our women and children, rather than feed the populations who produce them, we may be sure that any imported food would go the same way or be employed to relieve the enemy of the responsibilities he has assumed.

These truths of course are apparent to the Vichy Government and it follows that in his denunciation of the British blockade, Al. Baudouin is not asserting or defending the interests of France, but those of the gangster aggressors by whom France meantime is enslaved. Like other recent utterances by members of the Vichy Government, the broadcast of the French Foreign Minister is suggestive chiefly of an unwholesome desire to drag others down to the level to which he and his colleagues have fallen.

At. no point, in his address was Al. Baudouin convincing. He went far towards implying that Britain withheld military help 'which might have enabled the French Army to continue its resistance. It has been, made clear, however, that the French Army was so weakened by internal neglect-—particularly the failure to provide it with mechanised equipment —and by treason—that no help that Britain could possibly have given would have averted the French collapse. The full story ol: the treason that denied a considerable part of the French Army an opportunity to fight has yet to be unfolded, but for the neglect of adequate and efficient modern organisation and equipment several members of the Vichy Government—not least the veteran Marshal Petain —bear a large share of responsibility.

The answer to M. Baudouin’s plea that it would have been cowardly to leave France and continue the struggle in the colonies'is provided in Marshal Petain’s admission that the Vichy Government is under the domination of the Nazis. It is a Government only in name, serving not France, but the Nazi invaders and oppressors of France. The misfortunes of France certainly have not been lessened, though they may have been and may yet be accentuated, by the constitution of the Vichy Government. On. the other hand, a quick and bold decision to continue the struggle in the colonies would have made it possible to build up strong and effective forces in Northern Africa, Syria and elsewhere which could have done much, in co-operation with Britain, to bring nearer the day of the liberation of France. M. Baudouin and those for whom he speaks have their answer in the action of free Frenchmen and in that of the small but resolute forces of Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Belgians and Dutchmen who, in spite of even more crushing disasters, in most instances, than that which has befallen France, are gallantly continuing the struggle for their own national redemption and for the re-establishment of liberty and justice in the world.