LAVAL & DARLAN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 June 1941, Page 5

LAVAL & DARLAN

SINGLED OUT BV MR HULL DENUNCIATION OF TREASON TO FRANCE. SOME VICHY ADMISSIONS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) WASHINGTON, June 14. The Secretary of State, Mr Hull, made a statement naming M. Laval and Admiral Darlan as the leaders fostering the French surrender of loyalties to Hitler and alleging that they were using France to fight Germany’s battles in Syria. Mr Hull said that if the French people accepted this preposterous status they would find themselves co-bel-ligerents with Hitler in his desperate effort to conquer Britain and secure control -of the seas. In the prevention of such a possibility both the French people and the people of the United States had a common interest of tremendous importance to the future. The British entered Syria to prevent the further expansion of German aggression, which Vichy had permitted if not abetted. Mr Hull added that, aside from Syria and considering only the aspects of Franco-German collaboration contained in the public statements of the Darlan-Laval element, it had been demonstrated that the people of France were expected not only to surrender permanently and unconditionally their loyalty to all French traditions, institutions, liberties, interests, culture and the entire way of life which made France great, but actually to transfer all these loyalties and all hope for the future to Hitler in the hope of securing his personal favour. The adoption of Hitlerism would set the world back by from five to 10 centuries. A British United Press message says a Vichy spokesman replying to Mr Hull’s statement that France was fighting Germany’s battle in Syria, denied that Britain had any ground for intervention, but admitted that German planes had used Syria as a stepping-off stone and that the Italian-German armistice commission might have sent some seized French war material to Iraq. The Axis, he said, was acting within the rights of the armistice convention. France had adopted the policy of Franco-German collaboration on her own initiative.