EUROPEAN ALLIANCE

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4820, 7 August 1939, Page 7

EUROPEAN ALLIANCE

HERR HITLER’S AIM. UNLIKELY TO ABANDON IT. REALITIES GRASPED IN BRITAIN The plan set forth in “Mein Kampf” is that of organising an absolutely united, disciplined and highly-armed Germany, able through the resolution of its diplomacy and the weight of it armed might to impose its will on all its neighbours, one by one, where necessary with the help of allies. That plan was used first to escape from the fetters of the peace treaties through the introduction of conscription, the breaches of other disarmament clauses, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, and the absorption of Austria into the Reich. It was successful largely because the neighbours of Germany were unable to unite, feeling, as they did, that fundamentally Germany had much justice on her side in these demands.

A large number felt the same about the Sudetenland. But the drastic and brutal subjugation of Czechoslovakia, in direct violation of the Munich peace followed by parallel action by Italy in Albania, produced a vehement revulsion of feeling. The test of justice now pointed the other way. There was nothing in the peace treaties to equal in repression the treatment of the Czechs.

But by then the strategic position had been gravely prejudiced. It was clear that, unless Great Britain and France could form a solid coalition of resistance to further aggression, it would grow much worse. Poland, Rumania, Jugoslavia, and the rest of the small States of Central Europe, would be speedily overrun and coerced into subordination; Russia and the United States would retire into defensive isolation; and Great Britain and France would be left alone, without allies, to attempt to resist the remorseless advance, first over Europe and then over most of Asia and Africa, of the anti-Comintern Juggernaut.

So far the building of the grand coalition has gone well. Combined with the movement of the American Fleet to the Pacific, it seems to have had the effect of loosening the allegiance of Japan to the axis Powers. It has also raised in Italy widespread doubts whether the axis policy is not leading into total subordination to German policy, while leaving her to bear the main brunt of a war. On the other hand, all coalition are inherently unstable. They depend uopn the willingness of each member to go to war for all the rest, and that willingness is apt to flag with time. It is extremely unlikely that Herr Hitler is going to abandon his programme. He will certainly try to prove that the coalition is not as solid as it seems. Some believe that he will try conclusions with France and England is the very near future, before they are fully rearmed; for if, he could achieve a sudden victory by the violence and unexpectedness of his attack, that would be his shortest road to world power.

Others believe that he will wait till the present tension has died down, and then resume his military pressure on the weakest element in the grand alliance, confident that the rest will shrink from taking action that might lead to world war in order to prevent, for instance, the incorporation in the Reich of the German city of Danzig, which is also the key to Polish independence. If he succeeds in this, he will use this local success to prove that the coalition is impotent against German power and his own diplomatic skill. If he coalition resists, as it ought, it will be taking its stand, not on the particular merits of the Danzig issue or any other, but in order to restore two principles necessary to civilised international life: that every free nation, like the Czechs, has the right to independence and that the overdue changes in the treaty settlement having now been made, any further revision of the status quo must be carried out by free negotiation and not at the point of the sword.