REAL TEST COMING.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 62, Issue 7, 20 October 1941, Page 5

REAL TEST COMING.

GERMAN MENACE IN THE EAST.

NEED FOR BIG BRITISH ARMY.

LONDON, October 18,

Britain’s need for a large army to face the German menace in the East and at home was emphasised by Baron Croft, Joint Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for War, in a speech at Hornsey. “Our real test of strength and endurance is only now about to commence,” lie said. “The German armies fighting in Russia against an enemy numerfi cally superior and excellently equipped have advanced more than 1400 miles. The Germans will almost certainly come at Batum and Baku across the Caucasus by the spring. If this is so, the Iranian frontier becomes vital to us —first in supporting the Russian defence of Baku if they will let us, and second, to deny the road to Egypt, India and the East. “I believe that with the great army raised in India together with bur own forces based in Egypt we can hold the line to the East. I believe that if the brave Russian people stick it like their forbears we may yet see the Germans held on the East, but even so our army is still faced with a mobile army of far greater strength in the command of German generals.” Lord Croft then recalled the achievements of .the Imperial Armies in the East. When France fell, General Sir Archibald Wavell Irad 90,000 men against 500,000. “Nevertheless we utterly destroyed the Italian army in Cyrenaica and took 200,000 prisoners with astonishingly few casualties. Having given a guarantee to Greece, impelling considerations of national honour, demanded that we send every available man from Libyal to her aid. “Had the Serbs concentrated their divisions in the south and had the Greeks been able to detach some of their fine forces from the Albanian battlefield to hold the vital passes into their country until we arrived, we might have built on those very strong positions and held the Germans. By fighting in Greece and Crete we delayed the German attack on Russia by at least six weeks.”

Lord Croft thought that Britons felt immense pride in the achievements of the Army in its campaigns. “Never have risks been so freely taken, never have set-backs been so brilliantly retrieved, rarely have victories been so complete, so cheap in cost of lives or more far-reaching in their strategy as in the conquest of the vast Italian East African empire,” he said. “The whole Middle Eastern position lias now changed to our advantage. There is hardly a single regiment of fame in the British Army which has not seen hard fighting, either in France, Belgium or Norway, as well as in Africa, Greece and Crete. The Royal Armoured Corps, the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers and the Royal Army Service Corps have been engaged in every one of these campaigns. In proportion to its size the Royal Armoured Corps has suffered more casualties than any other of the forces of the Empire.”—British Official Wireless.