M.P. WINS £5 BET

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24254, 23 March 1940, Page 20

M.P. WINS £5 BET

LONDON NOT BOMBED WHAT OF THE FUTURE? WILL NOT RENEW WAGER (From Our Own Correspondent* LONDON, Feb. 27.; A bet of £5 has been won by Colonel J. C. Wedgwood, M.P., that no bomb would fall on London in the first six months of the war. Discussing the reasons which made him take the bet, Colonel Wedgwood, in the Daily Express, said that he could "run through the whole alphabet." But when asked whether he would extend the bet for a further< six months, he said, "No. Because I now hope I should lose." "All I know now is that the Germans will not bomb us unless we bomb them; and I think the time has now ccme to bomb military objectives in Germany—we have taken enough photographs and dropped enough leaflets. We had better begin to take war seriously. It is no use hoping for ever that Hitler will begin. Why should he? "So long as we continue to spend £100,000,000 a year on evacuation and black-out; so long as we continue to keep an immense mobilised army in the Near East, costing us at least another £100,000,000 a year; so long as we continue to spend the same sum building monster battleships and air* craft carriers which Ajax and highspeed planes have rendered obsolete before they have left the slips; so long as we continue to take away for idleness in the army, at home and in France, men who are needed at work for the export trade; 'so long Hitler has everything to gain by delay. We do his work for him. "On the sea it is different. There we have a real war. But on land and in the air ' Sir Richard Strachan. with his sword drawn, is still waiting for the Earl of Chatham.' There is no reason why thev should fight—all the less because each suspects that the attacker will get the. worst of it. " When we read the ' appreciations ' by ' Military Observers,' and the cables from every European capital informing us of Germany's plans, and hear of the Blitzkriegs from Herr Goebbels, we may wisely reflect on the power of wishful thinking. They all want us to spend more and ' likes to make your flesh creep.' They certainly earn their money. " One can never be quite sure of what Hitler will do; but I no more think that he will invsde Holland than that he will bomb London, and I am quite certain he would regard as something worse than blasphemy the actual killing of a Swede. Swedish fear of German invasion is the falsest of political fakes."