STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 16 February 1942, Page 2

STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

1 FORTUNES AND PROSPECTS ' RKVIHW BY Mil CHURCHILL (Roc. 12.30 p.m.) Rugby, Feb. 15. The Prime Minister, Mi 1 I Churchill, broadcasting to-night (said: “Nearly six months has j passed since at the end of August I made a broadcast directly to my fellow-countrymen. It is therefore worth while looking back over this half-year of a I struggle for life—for that is what ; it has been and what it is—to see ! what has happened to our fori tunes and prospects. At that I time in August I had the pleasure i of meeting President Roosevelt { and drawing up with him a declaration of British and American policy which has become known to the world as the AtlanI tic Charter. We also settled a number of other things about the war, some of which have had an j important influence on its course. ! In those days we met on terms of a ! .hard pressed combination seeking as- ! sislance from a great friend who. however. was only a benevolent neutral. In those days the Germans seemed to I be tearing the Russian armies to pieces I and striding on with growing momen- | turn to Leningrad, Moscow, Rostov and ; even farther into the heart of Russia. It was thought a very daring assertion i when the President declared that the j Russian armies would hold out till the ! winter. You may say that military men I of all countries, friend, foe and neutral ! alike, were very doubtful whether this j would come true. “As for us. our British resources were 1 stretched to the utmost. We had alI ready been for more than a whole year ! absolutely alone in the struggle with : Hitler and Mussolini. We had to be | ready to meet a German invasion of i our own island. We had to defend Egypt, the Nile Valley and the Suez i Canal. Above all. we had to bring in j food, raw materials and finished munitions across the Atlantic in the teeth i of German and Italian U-boats and air- | craft, without which we could not live 'or wage war. It seemed our duty in ; those august days to do everything in i nur power to help the Russian people | meet the prodigious onslaught which j had been launched against them. It . is little enough we have done lor Rus- : sia. considering all she has done to beat ! Hitler and for the common cause. We j British had no means of providing ef~ : fectively against a new war with Japan. Such thu nntlnnlr vlion I ♦1

.Such was the outlook when I talked : with President Roosevelt in .the middle • of August on the good ship Prince of Wales, now. alas, sunk beneath the POSITIONS COMPARED "it is true that our position in August, ! 1941, seemed vastly better than it was j a year earlier, when France had just ' been beaten into the awful prostration ! in which she now lies, when we were j almost entirely unarmed in our own | island and when it looked as if Egypt ' and all the Middle East would be con- ! quered by the Italians, who still held Abyssinia and had newly driven us out ;of British Somaliland. Compared with j those days of 1940 when all the world | except ourselves thought we were down ! and out for ever, the situation the President and I surveyed in August, 1941, I was considerably better. Still, when you looked at it bluntly and squarely with the United States neutral and fiercely divided, with the Russian armies ; falling back with grievous Josses, with : the German military power triumphant and unscathed, with the Japanese menace assuming an uglier shape each day. 1 it certainly seemed a very bleak and anxious scene. "How do matters stand now? Taking it all in all are our chances of survival better or worse than in August. 1941? How is it with the British Empire or the , Commonwealth of Nations? Are we up ior down? What has happened to the 1 principles of freedom and decent civ- , ilisation for which we are fighting? Are i they making headway or in greater \ peril. Let us take the rough with the ; smooth. Let us put the good and bad I side by side and let us try to see exact|ly where we are. The first and greatj est of the events is that the United j States is now unitedly and whole- ! heartedly in the war with us. The ! other day I crossed the Atlantic again jto see President Roosevelt. This time we met not only as friends but as com- ! rades standing side by side and shoulder shoulder in the battle for dear life | and dearer honour in a common cause and against a common foe. When I survey and compute the power of the United States and its vast resources and feel that now they are in it with us, with the British Commonwealth ctf Nations all together, however “long it lasts, till death or victory, I cannot believe there is any other fact in the whole world which can compete with that. That is what I dreamed of, aimed at, worked for and now it has come to pass. But there is another fact in some ways more immediately effective. The Russian armies have not been defeated. They have not been torn to pieces. The Russian peoples have not been conquered or destroyed.

Leningrad and Moscow have not been taken. Russia’s armies are in ; the field. They are not holding the line of the Urals or the line of the Volga. They are advancing victoriously, driving the foul invader from that native soil they guarded so bravely and loved so well. More j than that. For the first time they have broken the Hitler legend. Instead of , j the victorious and abundant booty ! which Hitler and his hordes gathered ! in the west he has found in Russia : so far only disaster, failure, the | shame cf unspeakable crimes the, 1 slaughter or loss of vast numbers of German soldiers and the icy wind' that blows across the Russian snows > —B.O. W. j TWO FUNDAMENTAL FACTS ! Ueue then, are the two tremendous I I fundamental facts which will in the I lend dominate the world situation and; ■ make victory possible in a form never! j 1 -store possible. But there is another J heavy and terrible side to the account l which must be set in the balance I against these inestimable gains. Japan j ba? plunged into war and is ravaging! j the beautiful, fertile, prosperous and, densely populated lands in the Far | East. It would never have been in the ! power of the British while fighting I ! Germany and Italy—nations long bar- ] i dened and prepared for war—while ! | lighting in the North Sea. in the Medi- | terranean, and the Atlantic to defend! the Pacific and the Far East single- 1 handed against the onslaught of the; j Japanese. We have only just been able,, to keep our heads above water at home. Only by narrow margin have : v e brought in the food which keeps us‘| alive, and supplies without which we cannot wage war. Only by so little • have we held our own in the Nile Valley, and the Middle East. The Medi- j I terranean is closed and all our trans- i ports have to go round the Cape of Good Hope. Each ship is making only ! three voyages in a year. Not a ship. ! not an aeroplane, not a tank, not an , | anti-tank gun or an anti-aircraft gun < las stood idle. Eveiything we have 1 i has been deployed either against the ; } enemy or awaiting his attack