The Waikato Times THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1940 SHOULD IT BE UNLIMITED WAR ?

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21228, 26 September 1940, Page 6

The Waikato Times THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1940 SHOULD IT BE UNLIMITED WAR ?

Inevitably the question whether indiscriminate German bombing should be answered with indiscriminate bombing has arisen in Britain, and is in the minds of people all over the world. According to a London newspaper, thousands of enraged citizens are demanding that drastic measures should be taken in an endeavour to stop the slaughter of civilians in London and elsewhere in Britain. That demand can well be understood, coming from people who have been submitted to the most ghastly brutality ever perpetrated. But the British Government must look at the whole problem from the widest point of view. Britons naturally shrink from the “ frightfulness ” which Germany has adopted as a deliberate policy to batter Britain into submission. They are prepared to strike to the limit of their ability at the German war machine—but a sense of decency remains and does not die easily. If the British Government complied with the suggestion that

“ total ” war should be adopted, and if it employed every bomber it could command in raining death on the German civilian population, what would the result be ? It is admitted that Germany has had, if she does not still possess, more aeroplanes than Britain. Brutal though the German attack already is, it could probably be made more frightful still. Britain might descend to the level of the German, tactics without gaining any advantage. Further, Britain has been employing its air force to the best possible advantage in striking at military objectives which supply Germany with the means to carry on the struggle. If aeroplanes were diverted from these objectives to the bombing of civilians, Germany’s power to continue the fight would stand the strain so much the longer.

Britain is demonstrating heroically that air raid frightfulness will not win a war where determined people are concerned. Everybody knows that the Germans are determined fighters. Why then expect them to collanse or to shrink from the horrors of war when Britons refuse to do so ? If both descended to the same depths of brutality the last vestiges of human decency would have disappeared from the scene and Britons after the war would find it more difficult to hold their heads erect. Such heroics perhaps occur easily in a land so far from the centre of the conflict as New Zealand, but they must still occupy an important place in the history of the world that has yet to be written in the years beyond the war. Tt is true that if the Hun is allowed to prevail such standards of conduct will become the order in the new world. But he cannot prevail. The whole war is being fought to banish from the world the violence and the brutality which Hitlerism represents. Should Britain itself attempt to establish the new order on a foundation of brutality ? Possibly strict regard for the rules of warfare will entail more prolonged suffering, but probably it will not. It may be argued that total war now is better than a German victory. But there is to be no German victory. For twelve long months everything that could go against the cause of British has so gone—excepting a few of the great essentials, including the Navy. The struggle may still be lpng and arduous, and Britons may suffer because they refuse to abandon their self-respect, but there are signs that the tide is turning.