COMMENT and REFLECTIONS

Evening Star, Issue 23497, 10 February 1940, Page 11

COMMENT and REFLECTIONS

There are several indications that Germany's first spring effort for a lightning decision will be concentrated upon an intensive campaign to drive British and neutral shipping from home waters. Success, no one needs telling, would be a mortal counter to our blockade. The air raids of the last fortnight , flung indiscriminately and callously upon the most inoffensive and defenceless of quarry (even lightships) may tvell be what a German officer described this week as a general rehearsal for an offensive in which swarms of planes and waves of submarines would participate, ending the war (opines this optimist) within a few months . Certainly the recent raid, spread over 400 miles of shipping lanes in the North Sea, without any attempt at extension inland, gives point to this theory. But it is one thing to plan, another to perform. For example, “ waves of submarines is a highly delusive pretension. Actually, half Germany s submarines have been lost with their personnel, and even supposing she can replace at the rate of one a week (which experts do ffot credit), she has no underwater fleet to provide “’waves’” of submarines. At the turn of the year the maximum number available to her was 65. Again, the success of aerial bombing is by no means established as against an armed vessel, still less against a convoyed fleet of vessels, whose risk of loss has worked out at less than a fifth of 1 per cent. And, since every day more and more neutral merchantmen are being committed to the charge of the Royal Navy, it may well be that Germany's indiscriminate bombing and mining of neutral shipping are having a disastrous boomerang effect. The other side of the picture is that convoys have not yet been attacked in real force, and it would be idle to argue too closely from their large immunity to date.

It is only too likely, as the Hon. R. G. Casey, Australia's first Minister at Washington, said the other day, that the great surge of Germany's air power has not yet descended, the full fury power is yet to fall, so that we should beware of too careless an optimism. All we can safely say is that Britain has much to he thankful for in the hitch (whatever it is) that has caused Goering to nurse his air fleet so carefully, to forgo the tremendous initial advantage he possessed in numbers, enabling us to add with ever-increasing speed to our own air squadrons and trained personnel. Incidentally, too, since our. fighters have not been overwhelmed by mere numbers as they might have been, and in their encounters with individual enemy planes have won a great preponderance of successes, they have gained a psychological confidence that augurs well for like successes in the major air battles in the offiing. We can await the issue with a good deal of faith.

Figures quoted by a London: correspondent should assuage the misgivings expressed in some quarters about our shipping losses. In the first four months of war (before our extra defences were brought into action) we lost a total of 408,413 tons, while in the corresponding four months of 1917 in the Great War (after three years experience) we lost 899,963 tons. Against the present drain we can set 96,000 tons of enemy shipping captured and available for our service, while the output from our shipyards equals the balance of losses. There does not seem to be much room for depression here. Until the recent not too successful British raid upon itfew people knew much about Sylt, Germany's biggest island outside the Baltic, just as vital to her air strategy now as was Heligoland to her naval strategy formerly. It is, in fact, one of the enemy's most important air bases. Sylt is the island of the Frisian Group situated farthest north on the German North Sea coast. For an air offensive it provides the shortest flying distance to the British naval bases in Scotland, and it is, moreover, from a defensive viewpoint a highly important base for the defence of Hamburg and Bremen. Forty miles north of Heligoland,* Sylt is fitted as a formidable air and naval base. Germany's minelayers and bombers are launched from this island, which has underground hangars and is connected with the mainland by the Hindenberg Dam. The Belgrade conference of the Balkan entente has had several consequences that seem to preclude any spread of the conflagration in thai direction. The most important factors are a marked improvement in the relations between Bulgaria and the Entente, and Hungary's undertaking to refrain from making territorial claims on Rumania for the war's duration. This seems at any rate to pave the way to a solid Balkan bloc, which would make a vital difference to the present European situation. It is difficult to follow the enemy's reasoning of this concordance <w a defeat for Allied diplomacy. The Finnish situation shows little change. The Russians are pressing strongly but with very limited success on the Mannerheim line; and on the other hand, the redoubtable Finns have routed another division in the north, claiming a bag of 13,000 Russians and 300 tanks north of Lake Ladoga. At Dunedins first recruiting meeting Mr J. A. Lee expressed the view that death were better than life under Fascism. Death would assuredly be his lot, and ours,. if Nazism prevailed. It has proved a cancerous growth, with all the malignancy of that bodily illness, and an astonishingly relevant " case history." A cancer is describable briefly as the disorderly, illegal growth of a group of cells, with, presently, the formation of a special sort of tumour. When this tumour has reached an advanced stage of growth some of its cells migrate to another part of the body and create another tumour. Does not this bodily process find only too close a parallel in Germany's role to-day? Malignant growths commonly derive from some form of irritation, furnished in Germany's case by a constant tickling of a susceptible people's preposterous idea of racial superiority. Already we have there the second stage of a cancer, medically known as metastasis — that is the sending out of colonies throughout the body, the spread of the disease. It is this cancer that we have set ourselves to destroy before it infects and destroys us — the malignant theory that the Germans are a people set apart, consecrated by their Nordic gods to ride; and since the disease is well advanced in the stage of metastasis, we have to employ (aren't the terms singularly apposite to military usages) the surgeon's weapons — the knife and the constant stream of " bullets " with which radium and the X-ray bombard a malignant growth, hoping (as we do) that the cells of the tumour can be destroyed ivithout too much damage to the patient's body.