Honour, Glory Belong To Whole British People: Menzies

Northern Advocate, 23 May 1941, Page 6

Honour, Glory Belong To Whole British People: Menzies

Winning War No Part-Time Job

[Special to “Northern Advocate”] ,AUCKLAND, This Day. HPHE PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA (MR. MENZIES) SAID AT A DINNER HELD IN HIS HONOUR BY THE GOVERNMENT AT THE GRAND HOTEL LAST NIGHT THAT IN THE LONG AND GLORIOUS HISTORY OF OUR RACE GREAT FAME HAD BEEN WON BY ARMIES AND NAVIES, BY FIGHTING FORCES, BY GENERALS AND ADMIRALS, WHOSE NAMES WERE RECORDED AND WHOSE PORTRAITS HUNG ON WALLS, BUT THIS WAS THE FIRST WAR IN WHICH THE HONOUR AND GLORY BELONGED NOT TO A FEW MEN, BUT WAS THE HONOUR AND GLORY OF AN ENTIRE PEOPLE.

yi'r. Menzies spoke of the issues confronting the British Empire, and showed clearly the magnitude of the menace ‘by which the British people are confronted.

lie said lie had no thought of defeat, but he was convinced that only the best that every man. woman and child could give would suffice to win.

“Thank God for a Good King” Mr. Menzies, to give his audience a picture of the freedom with whicn King George moves among his subjects, especially those who had suffered most, told the story of His Majesty s visit to a bombed area. A cheerful bystander slapped him on the shoulder and said: “Thank God for a good King.” “And His Majesty turned, put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and said, “and thank God for a good people.” “We are going to win this war because we have a good people,” Mr. Menzies said. “I could not have believed how valiant is the spirit of the common man.” The British people had not always been as enlightened as now, he said. They had not always been as prepared to throw down the walls of privilege, or as shocked as they should be at poverty and injustice, yet the strange and almost divine thing was that in the back streets and slums of England there were men and women who had almost nothing to lose and who had been dealt with by life with the cruelest injustice, yet these were the people in whom the flame of resolution burned so fiercely that those who had seen it could never forget.

“If we have to work ourselves to the bone to produce tanks and guns and aircraft, let us give up argument and work ourselves to the bone.” This was a war in which the enemy already sat astride Europe, and tomorrow, for all we knew, he might sit astride half the world. He was not an enemy to be despised. He had gathered into his fold, by the process of European conquest, a great army of skilled workers, many of them in France.

Position of France

“I met General de Gaulle several times in England, and I formed a most profound respect for his character and outlook,” he continued. “But France today presents perhaps the supreme tragedy of history. “Insofar as she retained any vestige of freedom, she is governed largely by men who preferred the power, and as they see it, the security of German .authority to the individuality for which France stood. “I do not believe that the ordinary man is represented by that opinion, nor do I believe that the soul of a great nation can be snuffed out like a candle. Here and there in France is a flame that one day will blaze. “I believe in France because I believe in the spirit of the French people. Yet Frenchmen in occupied France today must work to live, and the product of their work is available to Germany. Germany, by conquering Italy—for Italy today is a German province—France, Czechoslovakia and Austria, has brought into her net the service of millions of men. Her production and her menace in number of machines is growing.” Mr. Menzies said that against this was the industrial power of Great Britain, with every factory liable to be bombed any night, the growing power of the British Dominions, and the vast, but almost untapped resources of the American Continent. “We can out-machine the foe, but how long is it going to take?” he asked.

Made Place Secure

Mr. Menzies scorned any suggestion that these people were puting their backs into winning the war because of the improved conditions they might expect afterwards. “The people who are doing these things in Great Britain, and by their spirit, are winning this war, have already made their own - place in the post-war world secure,” said Mr. Menzies. “I have encountered no thinking human being in Great Britain who does not realise that, if the price of victory is poverty—and I think it is — and what is wrong with poverty provided it is the poverty of freedom?— then the busines of statesmanship after the war is to see that poverty is honourably shared.” The common people of Britain, and he used the word “common” in the same meaning as “House of Commons,” these little people at whom the German finger was pointed in scorn, were the greatest of all generations who had found a place in history,” he said. He could not help feeling that there were no people in the world who could so magnificently withstand the ordeal as the people of Britain. What Tomorrow Brings Forth

Time Essence of Contract

British people should not again count up the millions ranged on either side and then say “nine must be greater than seven.” In winning this war, time was the essence of the contract.

“I am not content to develop our superiority of machines in three, five or seven years’ time,” he said, “but that is how long it Will take us unless we give up our rather comfortable and selfish point of view in which we say: ‘Yes, we must do what we can, but I have my rights and I really feel that, if I want to have a strike, I should be able to have one,’ or ‘lt is a choice of breaking something I established a year ago or being’ broken in by Germany, and we should discuss it.”

-“We have read of them, but we do not even begin to know what they have gone through,” he continued. , “We do not know what it is like to be in a city being subjected to all the rigour of war. When you go into any of the great industrial cities. Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol or others, and see what has been done to the homes and lives of the people, you begin to understand just what it must be where no solitary human being can see the sun set without thinking if he will see it rise again. “And then to see the people in their thousands, working cheerfully, magnificently, and saying with enthusiasm: ‘Yes, we have had a bad night. But production was 20 per cent, higher last week.’

“If that is the point of view, it will take us five, seven or nine years, and we will not recover in your lifetime or mine. We can get our superiority by deciding that, when this tempest blows, nothing else matters. “We want a kind of single-pur-pose league throughout the world. We must make up our minds that there is one job in hand and one only.”

“In our own countries, we could do twice wliat we are doing, and still step short of the sacrifice being made by the people of Great Britain. In those cities where death has fallen so suddenly that it has been necessary to have great community funerals of hundreds of unidentifiable fellow citizens, I will defy anyone to find a single person who would call a halt or sue for terms.

No Part-Time Job

Mr. Menzies said he had not come back from his journey overseas with any hint of defeat in his mind, but he had come back with a more vivid impression of the dangers of the war, and the fullness of the menace that confronted us.

“Defeat! The word has not been heard in any of those towns. The spirit of the people is such that they say: ‘lf everyone else in my house has gone into a common grave, I am still here. I must work and sweat, because this is not going to happen again to my people if I can help it.’ Inferior in Machines

Winning the war was no part-time job. If every man, woman and child devoted every ounce he or she had to winning the war, it would be enough, but nothing less would do. “I have a tremendous impression of the power, skill, ingenuity and diabolical cleverness of this evil thing we are fighting,” he added. “We are not fighting only for ourselves. We are fighting it for the 'world that comes after us.

“We have one great .inferiority to our foe. We are inferior in machines. We are not inferior in men. We are not inferior in spirit. In the long run the spirit wins, but it wins more quckly when the man who has it has the instruments to fight the foe.” Mr. Menzies said Germany had been preparing for years for war, amassing weapons, of great quality and in enormous quantity. The British went along persuading themselves that something would happen, and concentrating their attention on raising the general standar-ds, but suddenly found themselves confronted by. an enemy so immensely superior in machine pbWer that he had inflicted defeat after defeat upon us, and had not finished yet. ’Such an enemy would not be defeated by saying we had a just cause, and that truth was great and would prevail. And particularly we should not win by comforting ourselves with the thought that somehow we would muddle through. “I denounce this nonsense about muddling through,” Mr. Menzies said. “You will never muddle through to victory against Germany in this war. Not a scrap of individual comfort or standard of living matters a hoot until we have ‘Won - this war.

“I am merely putting into imperfect words the radiant spirit that shines in the darkest back-streets of Birmingham or Bristol. These people of Great Britain are the most magnificent people men ever beheld.

U.S. Admiration

“I am happy to say that in the United States I found something that confirmed what I had expected, that the development of American opinion in our favour, the growing consciousness that it is their Struggle because it will determine the type of world they will have, is not so much due to great speeches or the move and coun-ter-move of propaganda, but to the fact that the common man of the United States has looked across the Atlantic and seen the common man of Great Britain, and marvelled at him. “If there is one thing that has stirred America to the depth of her spirit, it is the spectacle of those people, with so little to lose, and so much valoUr to defend it.”