LISTENINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 114, 29 August 1941, Page 18

LISTENINGS

Perpetrated and illustrated by

KEN

ALEXANDER

History On The Atlantic

HURCHILL and Roosevelt must have converted the Atlantic "U" boats to frantic " Phew!" boats. And, no wonder! Germany claims to hold the key of Davy Jones’s locker and ‘to have a Boston crab on Neptune.

But Britain, "driven off the seas," can despatch her top-man over the waves for a salty chat with the head man of her "bottled up" neighbour. The absurdity of Admiral Hitler’s claim is so plain that even a German could be excused for seeing it. What are the wild waves saying? Probably "Take a roll, Adolf! You’re sunk!" Admiral Hitler and his salt sharks of the Reich must have felt slightly scuppered when they heard that "the two war-mongers" had held hands practically over the spot marked " U." And Admiral Raeder will have to do some dead reckoning to plot a course that will get him square with the Fuhrer. The trouble is that vinegar, not salt, runs in Hitler’s veins and he can’t understand that the sea has a way of getting one wet when one thinks he is home and dried. Many a better man has been pickled in the briny when he imagined that it was the other fellow who was bottled up. That’s the worst of these two-way oceans; it’s so difficult to control the traffic-especially the "heavies" with

all their teeth showing and a bite which is worse than their bark. As a highwayman, Hitler has had some success, but in the sea-lanes his hold-ups. are not always clean-ups. Hear Adolf giving it to Admiral Raeder abaft the binnacle! "What’s the big idea, Raeder? Here you've been yo-hoing and splicing the mainbrace all over the Admiralty like a real old sea dog who has swallowed a salt horse, and ‘what do I find? Youyou — tadpole! Churchill, whom I boasted was locked up in England as tight as a sardine in a tin, Churchill, whom I called Germany’s prisoner* of war in London-this Churchill sails across the Atlantic, practically scraping the paint off your periscopes, and meets | Roosevelt right on top of us. Call yourself an old salt-you--you kippered herring! What a smack in the swastika! Churchill and Roosevelt, together -practically in the bag! And you said that the Atlantic was a Nazi lagoon!" "But — blow me down! — Fuhrer, sufely you didn’t believe that lagoon stuff. Remember Musso and his Italian lakel"

"You gold-braided sea slug! -How dare you delude me! You know I can’t go to sea to see. The sea fairly makes me sick. Oh, how I wish the world were as dry as Mussolini’s navy. How can I keep on saying that we have won the battle of the Atlantic with Churchill and Roosevelt holding regattas all over it?" "Sorry, Fuhrer; but our ‘U’-boats have to spend so much time down under that it’s difficult to know what's going on up yonder. It’s the high cost of U-ing; depth charges are going up all the time." "Shiver m’ timbers!" shrieks Admiral Hitler. "How is it that whenever the swastika puts to sea it’s all at sea?"

"Well-scuttle me!-Fuhrer, it’s a hard thing for an old sea-daschund to admit, but I can’t help suspecting that Germany waives the rules but Britain rules the waves." Exit Raeder with full Gestapo honours,