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WAR MISTAKES

MADE BY “GLITTERING DICTATORS” CHURCHILL’S SURVEY IN ADDRESS TO MINERS LAST OCTOBER. AXIS BLUNDERS THAT SAVED DEMOCRACIES. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.30 a.m.) RUGBY, April 21. A remarkable speech on the war made by Mr Churchill at a secret conference with coal miners’ delegates in Westminster Hall on October 31 last is now made public. Mr Churchill defined the three great dangers ahead as the U-boat peril, a new attempt to invade England and the German hope of a compromise peace. We were, the British Prime Minister said, being saved .from the consequences of our shortcomings by the incomparably greater mistakes of “these all-wise glittering dictators.”

“Look at the mistake Hitler made in not trying an invasion in 1940,” said Mr Churchill. “He tried tentatively, but the R.A.F. crushed him. I have often asked myself what would have happened if he had put three-quarters of a million men on board all available barges and boats and let them stream across, and taken the chance of losing three-quarters of them. There would have been a terrible shambles in this country, because we had hardly a weapon. We had not, at that time, fifty tanks, whereas we now have ten or twelve thousand. We had a couple of hundred field guns, some brought out of museums. We had lost all our equipment at Dunkirk and in France and were indeed spared an agonising trial.” SECOND BLUNDER. The second blunder, Mr Churchill continued, was when the Germans invaded Russia, intending “to steal a large part of its cornlands and factories and make it a great slave area, ruled by the Herrenvolk,” but found “a national people ready to fight and die with a valour and steadfastness none can excel.” Another mistake was in forgetting the Russian winter. Another mistake was made by Japan “when she attacked Pearl Harbour instead of attacking us alone, who were already busy with Italy and Germany.” Mr Churchill said they had much to be thankful for and added that he felt sometimes that some guiding hand had intervened. “I have a feeling,” he said, “that we have a Guardian because we serve a cause, and we shall have that Guardian so long as we serve that cause faithfully.” U-BOAT CAMPAIGN. The first of all our dangers ahead, said Mr Churchill, was the U-boat peril. The oceans which were the United States’ shield had now become a bar through which the United States was struggling to bring its armies, fleets and air forces to bear upon the great common problems we had to face. Now we saw our way through. Although there would be many more U-boats working next year than now, and there might be 300 or 400 at work now, yet there was a vast shipping construction afoot, both in Britain and America. “But what a terrible waste it is,” said the Prime Minister. “Think of all these great ships sunk, full of priceless cargoes, and how necessary it is to make that extra intensification of effort which will enable us to get ahead, to establish a more complete mastery, and so to save these ships from being sunk, as well as adding new ones to the fleet by which alone the victory of the good cause can be achieved.”

ENEMY STRIKING POWER. “As to the second danger,” said Mr Churchill, “do not let us delude ourselves. Hitler lies in a centre, and across all great railway lines of Europe he can move, very rapidly, forces from one side to the other. He may close down on. one front and open up another. We have now, across in France and in the Low Countries, a German army as large as we have in Britain, apart from the Home Guard. That is our great standby against a parachute invasion. When I see the number of divisions there are in France and realise that he can bring back in a few months, at any time in the spring, sixty or seventy more divisions, while perhaps lying quiescent or adopting a defensive attitude, or perhaps giving ground on the Russian front, I cannot feel that the danger of invasion can be put out of our minds. If this man can strike us at the heart, the world is theirs. We are the target, we are the prize. We must be ready not only to take advantage of any weakness on their part, but prepared to ward off any counterstroke they may loose upon us. Do not let people suggest that the major dangers of this war are past. We got through one supreme crisis where we might have been snuffed out, and now I do not think such a crisis can recur, only because we are armed and ready. But do not let us suppose that dangers are past, even though a mortal danger was warded off two years ago.” LAST HOPE OF GUILTY HUNS. Referring to the third danger, Mr Churchill said: “The last hope of the guilty Huns is a stalemate. Their idea has been made very plain in a series of speeches by Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and others, all defining and describing one conception—the idea of making a vast fortress of the greater part of Europe and so holding out for years and years, hoping that we might get tired and fall out amongst ourselves and make a compromise peace, which could only mean that they would begin again. That is the third danger and in some ways the most insidious of all.”

Finally, Mr Churchill, after mentioning Britain’s great Allies, said: “Another great Ally is supremacy in the air. We have got that supremacy in Egypt now. Presently we will have it everywhere. Already we are blasting their war industries. Already they are receiving what they gave with interest, with compound interest. Soon they will get a bonus.” Concluding, Mr Churchill said: “Let it be the glory of our country to lead this world out of the dark valley into the brighter and' more genial sunshine. In the crisis of 1940 it is no

more than the sober truth to say that we saved the freedom of mankind. We gave Russia time to arm and the United States time to organise, but now it is a long, cold strain. We have to bear, harder perhaps for the British to bear than the shocks they know so well how to take. We must not cast away our great deliverance. We must carry our work to its final conclusion. We shall not fail.”

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAITA19430422.2.37

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 April 1943, Page 4

Word count
Tapeke kupu
1,089

WAR MISTAKES Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 April 1943, Page 4

WAR MISTAKES Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 April 1943, Page 4

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