WAR OUTLOOK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 November 1940, Page 9

WAR OUTLOOK

<s. MR A. V. ALEXANDER’S SURVEY FIGHT TO RE-ESTABLISH CIVILISATION. TOTALITARIANS CLASSED WITH DINOSAUR (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, November 3. In a broadcast, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr Alexander, gave a summary of the British position as it appears since he last spoke to the Empire. There were many, difficulties and dangers ahead, he said. No responsible person desired to under-estimate them. Not the least was the new intensified threat which followed the defection of the French army and from the acquisition by the enemy of naval and air bases for attack on shipping, recent losses in which, Mr Alexander said, had been heavy.

NAVAL PROBLEMS. Speaking of naval problems affecting these attacks, Mr Alexander said: “I make no promises and no prophesies. I merely say that the Admiralty has been overhauling every aspect of the problem of grappling with the enemy attacks by sea and air and testing every idea and method brought forward for consideration. Germany has presented the Navy with many novel problems at sea in this war, including the magnetic mine. We have tackled and solved each in turn. We shall equally do our best against the intensified U-boat campaign. In this war against the Mercantile Marine I think often of Nelson’s incessant cry for ’More fighters.’ How often in past months have I heard my professional advisers cry ‘More destroyers,’ and how welcome have been the 50 destroyers which America has sent us, and for which, as head of the Navy, I tender sincere and grateful thanks. I should be equally grateful for any more that can be spared.” Mr Alexander referred to the growing military strength. The men of the Regular Army, he said, had been reequipped and reorganised, and, together with great additional forces, were now “straining at the leash, full of confidence in their ability to give a good account of themselves.” “Let me also mention,” he said, “the immense encouragements we receive from real understanding of our trials and our cause, and the vast material aid which reaches us from the United States. AMERICAN AID. “We have not failed to remark on this side on the significance of the fact that in the Presidential election now drawing to a close, and which appears to us ovei' here to be singularly hardfought, the issue of aid for this country has by common consent of both parties been placed completely above the battle and accepted as common ground. We shall not easily forget that this has been so.” Mr Alexander addressed a word to “those who hold with the idea of a negotiated peace,” and bade them contemplate current events in France and tne continuous humiliation which the common enemy seeks to impose on Marshal Petain and the French Empire. The attack upon Greece had demonstrated again that in the totalitarian creed nothing gave the right to national existence save the size of the armed strength, said Mr Alexander, who added: "If a nation is large and has thousands of aeroplanes, tanks, and guns and no moral scruples, then it may exist. But nations with culture, tradition and a long civilisation, having given some of the greatest ideas from which the world has benefited, desire to live at peace with their neighbours and cultivate the arts of peace. None of these things avail a small country in the eyes of the totalitarian, in whose debased, abnormal and immoral mentality guns, tanks, aeroplanes and bombs in huge numbers and large size alone give the right to live. “The totalitarian ideal is that of the dinosaur—a huge body with a. tiny head and almost no brain. Well, dino- I saurs have vanished from the earth.”