SURRENDER OF FRENCH

Southland Times, Issue 24211, 22 August 1940, Page 7

SURRENDER OF FRENCH

Ability To Resist In Empire

OTHER COUNTRIES SET EXAMPLE

(United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright) LONDON, August 20. Referring to Somaliland, Mr *Churchill said that even though metropolitan France was temporarily overrun there was no reason why the French Navy and substantial parts of the French Army and the French Empire overseas should not have continued the struggle on Britain’s side. France might have remained one of the great combatants in the struggle and would have preserved the continuity of her life. Moreover, the French Empire might have advanced with the' British Empire to rescue the independence and integrity of the French motherland. Most other countries the, Germans had overrun had persevered valiantly and faithfully. Discussing the air battles of the last few days in which the course of the fighting so far has been most favourable to Britain, Mr Churchill said: “Greater efforts may yet be made by the enemy than any he has so far put forth. Hostile airfields are still being developed in France and the Low Countries and the movement of squadrons and material for attacking us is still proceeding. “Hitler could not admit defeat in his air attack on Britain without most serious injury. If, after all these boastings, blood-curdling threats and lurid accounts trumpeted around the world of the damage he has inflicted, of vast numbers of our Air Force he has shot down—so he says, with so little loss to himself—if, after the tales of the panicstricken British crouched in their holes cursing the plutocratic Government which has led them to such a plight, his whole air onslaught were forced tamely to peter out, the Fuhrer’s reputation for veracity of statement might be seriously impugned. We may be sure, therefore, that he will continue so long as he has strength and so long as any preoccupations he may have in respect of the Russian Air Force allow him to do so.”

Germany’s numerical superiority in the air remained, continued Mr Churchill, but in view of the fact that production in Britain already largely exceeded German production and that American production was only just beginning to flow in, it would not continue.

“We shall be able to continue the struggle indefinitely and as long as the enemy pleases, and the longer it continues the more rapid will be our approach first towards that parity and then into that superiority in the air upon which in a large measure the decision of the war depends,” he said. AIR FORCE PRAISED Mr Churchill paid eloquent tributes to the Royal Air Force, to the fighter pilots and to the bomber squadrons who, travelling far into Germany, have inflicted shattering blows upon the whole technical war-making structure of Nazi power. “We are able to verify the results of the bombing of military targets in Germany not only by the reports which reach us through many sources, but also by photography,” he said. “I have no hesitation in saying that this process—the bombing of military industries and the communications of Germany and the air bases and storage depots from which we are attacked, bombing which will continue upon an ever-increasing scale until the end of the war, and may in another year attain dimensions hitherto undreamed of—affords one of the surest if not the shortest of all roads to victory.” Even if the Nazi legions stood triumphant on the Black Sea or, ind< .d upon the Caspian, even if Hitler were at the gates of India, it would profit nothing if at the same time the entire economic and scientific apparatus of German war power lay shattered and pulverized at home. Mr Churchill, in the final passages of his speech, dealt with the lease of naval and aerial bases to the United States. He pointed out that Britain had to think not only for herself, but for the lasting security of the cause and the principles for which she was fighting. Some months ago the British Government had come to the conclusion that the interests of the United States and of the British Empire both required that the United States should have facilities for naval and air defence of the Western Hemisphere against the attack of a Nazi power which might have acquired a temporary but lengthy control of a large part of Western Europe and its resources. OFFER TO UNITED STATES The Government had therefore decided spontaneously—without asking or being offered an inducement—to inform the United States Government that it would gladly place such defence facilities at the disposal of the United States by leasing suitable sites in British trans-Atlantic possessions. Mr Churchill recalled that the principle of association of interests for common purposes between Britain and the United States had developed even before the war in the various agreements reached about certain small islands in the Pacific Ocean which had become important air fuelling points. “Presently we learned that anxiety was also felt in the United States about the air and naval defence of their Atlantic seaboard and President Roosevelt made it clear that he would like to discuss with us and Canada and Newfoundland the development of American naval and air facilities in Newfoundland and the West Indies,” Mr Churchill said. “There is, of course, no question of any transference of sovereignty or of any action being taken against the wishes of the various colonies concerned but, for our part, the British Government is entirely willing to accord defence facilities to the United States on a 99 years’ leasehold basis and we feel sure that our interests, no less than theirs and the interests of the colonies themselves and of Canada and Newfoundland, will be served thereby.”