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Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 7, 8 July 1940, Page 6

A little clear thinking will readily dissipate the confusion with which propagandists endeavour to cloud the forcible disablement of the French fleet at Oran. In the first place, France agreed not to make a separate peace. From this obligation France was never released, for the Petain j Government did not observe the chief j condition on which the British Government offered release—namely, that the French fleet should not be placed in a position admitting of its utilisation by the enemy. No observance of the vital condition means no release. The pretence that the French warships would have been safeguarded from utilisation by the enemy because of j enemy promises to that effect is too thin to be worth notice; for Hitler and Mussolini—the latter in Abyssinia, the former everywhere —had jlong ago demonstrated the bankruptcy of their credit. Breach of contract with them is not merely an accident; it is a fixed and active policy. It is therefore indisputable that the Petain Government first broke its undertaking not to make a separate peace, and then gave orders to its Admirals which would have provided the enemy with a navy! [whenever the enemy cared to stretch I out his hand. The British Government was therefore entitled, by every consideration of justice and of international law, to prevent the execution of the Petain Government's treaty-breaking orders; and, as soon as Admiral Gensoul had rejected the alternatives, there remained at Oran only the one course —naval attack— which Admiral Somerville took. All the irrelevancies of the propagandists, and all M. Baudouin's pretences that Britain in pre-war times led France by the nose into her international contracts, do not subtract one iota from the Petain Government's default, and do not undermine in the slightest degree Britain's right to remedy that default by the only means in her power. A Swedish paper quoted in today's news regards it as "obvious" that Britain could not accept the Italian and German guarantees. No retreating French or British General would fail to blow up his ammunition dump on the promise of the German General that the ammunition would not be used. Such a suggestion would cause a smile, yet the German General's pledge would be at least as reliable as any pledge by Hitler and Mussolini. Moreover, the German General's chance of maintaining his personal pledge, against the dictates of the Dictators, would be just about equal to the Petain Government's chance of maintaining the neutrality of French warships in French waters, under the terms of the Petain capitulation. All attempts to bolster up the Petain Government's right to redirect the French naval squadrons therefore fall to the ground. Such attempts have no basis either in the law of nations, in the law of self* preservation to which a deserted ally has just recourse, or in the laws of common sense. M. Baudouin's special pleading wears so thin that he has to lapse into the irrelevancies of pre- i war history, his interpretation of j which is that France, because of Britain's political pressure, got into! a war which she should not have en-; tered, or got into it on the wrong side. But it was only after the French collapse on the Meuse, and its consequences, that M. Baudouin discovered that he (not France) was on the wrong side. All these complaints about being unwillingly at war, and about bearing a disproportionate weight of the war, are after-thoughts invented to excuse surrender; and, in any case, are irrelevant to the issue raised by the fighting at Oran. The purpose of Hitler and Mussolini is to use France to win the war. It is\ announced from Berlin that the German military authorities have requisitioned all agricultural produce, foodstuffs, and semi-manufactured products in occupied France. It is reported— but not confirmed—that a French aeroplane was used in bombing attacks on Gibraltar. The idea that Britain should regard seriously a Hitler-Mussolini assurance as to the non-use of any stick within the Hitler-Mussolini reach will not be taken seriously by any unprejudiced person within the civilised world. Its reception in America, to whom M. Baudouin pays special appeal, is frankly humorous. If the British Government had allowed the Petain Government's orders to its warships to be carried out, the same people who now call the Oran fighting "the greatest criminal enterprise in history" would be taunting Britain with lack of determination and with a I defeatist spirit. Those same critics would have used our naval inactivity as a stick with which to assault our honour just as they do now, but to i assault it from the opposite side. A

Britain that failed to open fire at Oran would have become not an international thug but an international coward. Propaganda used on those lines, to undermine British prestige, would have broken out all over the world. Even our American friends would have been embarrassed. But now America knows that Britain is out to win the war, and will shrink from no ordeal. At the same time, the painfulness of the ordeal cannot, and will not, be concealed. "The greatest tragedy of the war" will have effect not only on human reason but on human emotions. Let it be hoped that as French understanding of the Petains and the Baudouins grows, French toleration of Britain's action in a crisis will grow with it.