VICTORY IN THE DESERT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27028, 12 March 1949, Page 9

VICTORY IN THE DESERT

Churchill Memoirs

January 5, 1941. Sir, I am honoured by your Majesty s most gracious letter. The kindness with which your Majesty and the Queen have treated me since I became First Lord and still more since I became Prime Minister has been a continuous source of strength and encouragement during the vicissitudes of this fierce struggle for life. I have already served your Majesty’s father and grandfather for a good many years as a Minister of the Crown, and my father and grandfather, served Queen Victoria, but your Majesty’s treatment of me has been intimate and generous to a degree that I had never deemed possible. Indeed, Sir, we have passed through days and weeks as trying and as momentous as any in the history of the English Monarchy, and even now there stretches before us a long, forbidding road. I have been greatly cheered by our weekly luncheons in poor old bomb-battered Buckingham Palace and to feel that in your Majesty and the Queen there flames the spirit that will never be daunted by peril, nor wearied by unrelenting toil. This war has drawn the Throne and the people more closely together than was ever before recorded, and your Majesties are more beloved by all classes and conditions than any of the princes of the past. I am indeed proud that it should have fallen to my lot and duty to stand at your Majesty’s side as First Minister m such, a climax of the British story, and it is not without good and sure hope and confidence in the future that I sign, myself “on Bardia day,” when the gallant Australians are gathering another twenty thousand Italian prisoners. Your* Majesty’s faithful and devoted servant and subject, ' WINSTON S. CHURCHILL.

We may, I am sure, rate this tremendous year as the most splendid, as it was the most deadly, year in our long English and British story. It was a great, quaintly-organised England that had destroyed the Spanish Armada. A strong flame of conviction and resolve carried us through the twenty-five years’ conflict which William 111 and Marlborough waged against Louis XIV. There was a famous period with Chatham. There was the long struggle against Napoleon, in which our survival was secured through the domination of the seas by the British Navy under the classic leadership of Nelson and his associates. A million Britons died in the First World War.

But nothing surpasses 1940. By the end of that year this small and ancient island, with its devoted Commonwealth, dominions and attachments under every sky, had proved itself capable of bearing the whole impact and weight of world destiny. We had not flinched or’ wavered. We had not failed. The soul of the British people and race had proved invincible. The citadel of the Commonwealth and Empire could not be stormed. Alone, but upborne by every generous heart-beat of mankind, we had defied the tyrant in the height of his triumph.

All our latent strength was now alive. The air terror had been measured. The island was intangible, inviolate. Henceforward we too would have weapons with which to fight. Henceforward we too would be a highly organised war machine. We had shown the world that we could hold our own. There were two sides to the question of Hitler’s world domination. Britain, whom so many had counted out, was still in the ring, far stronger than she had ever been, and gathering strength with every day. And not only to our national side. The United States was arming fast and drawing ever nearer to the conflict, Soviet Russia, who with callous miscalculation had adjudged us worthless at the outbreak of the war, and had brought from Germany fleeting immunity and a share

of the booty, had also become much stronger and* had secured advanced positions for her own defence. Japan seemed for the moment to be overawed by the. evident prospect of a prolonged world war, and anxiously watching Russia and the United States, meditated profoundly what it would me wise and profitable to do. And now this Britain, and its farspread association of States and dependencies, which had seemed on the verge of ruin, whose very heart was about to be pierced, had been for fifteen months concentrated upon the war problem, training its men and devoting all its infinitely-varied vitalities to the struggle. With a gasp of astonishment and relief the smaller neutrals and the subjugated States saw that the stars still shone in the sky. Hope, and within it, passion, burned anew in the hearts of hundreds of millions of men The good cause would triumph. Right would not be trampled down. The flag of Freedom which in this fateful hour was the Union Jack would still fly in all the winds that blew.

But I and my faithful colleagues who brooded with accurate information at the summit of the scene had no lack of cares. The shadow of the U-boat blockade already cast its chill upon us. All our plans depended -upon the defeat of this menace. The Battle of France was lost. The Battle of Britain was won. The Battle of the Atlantic had now to be fought.

[Copyright 1949 in USA by the New York Times Company and Time (Inc.) (publisher of Time and Life): in the British Empire by the Daily Telegraph, Ltd?: elsewhere by International Co-opera-tion Press Service, (Inc.). World rights reserved. Reproduction in full or in part in any language strictly prohibited.]

This concludes the publication of instalments from “ Their Finest Hour,” which is Volume II of “The Second World War.”