WORDS OF WARNING.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 December 1940, Page 4

WORDS OF WARNING.

r pWO British Ministers have lately been at pains to discourage anything in the nature of unduly easy optimism in regard to the war outlook, Lord Beaverbrook declaring that there is no doubt that the air battle will resume in full fury in the spring and Mr Herbert Morrison that victory will not be won without “effort stupendous and prolonged.” Undoubtedly it is wise counsel, to be taken to heart in every part of the Umpire, that we cannot afford to slacken in the slightest degree in any part of our war effort. With that fact recognised and acted upon, however, it is part of an effective war effqrt that we should not allow ourselves to be deceived into placing too high an estimate upon the fighting power of the enemy. Against all that has been and is being accomplished by the fighting forces of Britain and her allies there are, of course, darker elements in the picture—particularly the continued night bombing of British cities and the heavy toll enemy U-boats are taking of merchant shipping. The havoc that is being wrought in these ways and others gives all possible force to the demand for the full-powered and unsparing war effort which alone will bring relief. That effort should be strengthened and not weakened, however, by a perception that the enemy, though he is, as Mr Morrison observed, the most formidable military and air power in the world, is in some material particulars relatively less formidable than he was. Whatever the fury of ail' battle and of conflict in other fields to be expected in the spring, it is reasonably certain that Nazi Germany can never hope again to bring to bear, in conflict in the air or on land, anything like the preponderance of numbers and weight of material of which she was possessed when she failed to destroy the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, and in the more recent days when the Luftwaffe was beaten, as .Mr Morrison observed .justly, in. one of the greatest and most decisive battles in the history of the world. . It would be dangerously foolish to underestimate the remaining power of an enemy only partly beaten, but it should be remembered too, that one of the weapons of the Nazi dictatorship, inherited from Imperial Germany, is the myth of the invincibility of the German military power. That myth was exploded in 1918 and its revival should, not be permitted today. As a brochure issued by the British Ministry of Informal ion observes:, “The story that the German Army was not beaten in 1918 is a lie. So is the story that the German Army cannot be beaten todav,”