SHIPS & PLANES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 July 1941, Page 5

SHIPS & PLANES

VAST CONSTRUCTION PLANS IN U.S.A. OUTPUT EXPANDING APACE DECLARATION BY MR HOPKINS. DEMOCRACIES TO GET SUPPLIES THEY NEED. LONDON, July 18. Mr Harry Hopkins, supervisor of the United States Lease or Lend programme, who is visiting Britain, has outlined his country’s shipping programme. “We are going to build enough ships to bring goods into the United Kingdom and every theatre of war where the democracies are fighting Hitler,” he said. Mr Hopkins said the United States was building 1,000,000 tons of shipping this year, 6,000,000 tons next year and substantially more in 1943. Next year’s building programme would be 2,000,000 tons more than the peak reached in the United States during any year of the last war. Mr Hopkins said a vast programme of aeroplane construction had also been put in hand in the United States and was moving ahead with ever-in-creasing rapidity. Four-engined planes would reach to the most easterly districts of Germany and strike at Germany’s sources of supply. Britain and America, he said, would be able to build far more planes than Germany and better ones. The war could not be lost. The President had said that American goods were going to arrive in Britain. America was going to protect the ships bringing these goods.

FIRM CONFIDENCE

MR HOPKINS ON WAR OUTLOOK. DEMOCRACIES CANNOT LOSE. (Received This Day, 9.15 a.m.) LONDON, July 18. “To all those throughout the world who are wondering what will be the outcome of the war I say this war cannot be lost,” declared Mr Harry Hopkins, in an interview with British journalists at the American Embassy. “America's production is increasing every month, will continue to increase and will be far more extensive than anybody realises. “The whole productive effort of Britain and America must be directed,” Mr Hopkins continued, “to providing munitions sufficient to overwhelm dictatorship. We have got to whip this fellow. I am convinced that the British Empire, the United States and other countries which are still free can make larger quantities of mechanised equipment than Germany. I have come to’ discuss the whole problem of supplies for the United Kingdom and the Middle East. That includes anything you can mention, including munitions, food and shipping requirements.”