WINNING THE WAR

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4403, 17 March 1941, Page 5

WINNING THE WAR

BRITAIN AND AMERICA. A COLOSSAL TASK. POOLING OF RESOURCES. “It is now generally accepted that the supreme compensation for the present world chaos and anarchy is the growing understanding, sympathy and co-operation between two great branches of the English-speaking peoples. This co-operation had as its immediate objective the winning of the war, but it has an even more important long-term objective, the winning of peace. There can be no world reconstruction without security. No power on earth is in sight to validate such security except the pooling of bases, forces and resources by the Empire and America.” These were the opening remarks of Mr Frank Milner in an address at Oamaru given under the auspices of the British-American Co-operation Movement. NO APPEASEMENT. “In view of the irreconcilable antagonism of the ideals of the totalitarian States and the democracies no appeasement or compromise whatever can provide a final solution,” Mr Milner said. “The two ways of life are mutually and totally exclusive. Any negotiated peace means a recurrence of brigandage and terrorism, and a repetition of this holocaust for our children and our children’s children. The way of freedom and the way of force can never be reconciled. Besides, Prussian history reveals a fiendish heritage going back for 2000 years of brutal militarism and the deification of ruthless force. German militarism is unique in its hypnotic potency over its responsive multitudes. Central European youth are warped and poisoned in mind through the ceaseless propaganda of tribal barbarism and the indoctrination of racial supremacy. It is going to take a generation to exorcise this fanaticism. SURE FOUNDATION. “The peace will inundate the world with an orgy of emotionalism and all sorts of sentimental panaceas, such as the federation of the world, United States of Europe, Federal Union of Democracies and League of Nations. In their reaction from the red ravine of war men will be captured by these millennial aspirations. But they have no stability. We must find sure and lasting foundations to build upon. The only power capable of holding this tortured world in peace during the aftermath of war is the conjoined forces and resources of America and our Empire. It will be their job to combine navies, air forces, and bases indeed, all resources, in order to hold the world in peace while the pooled brains of the world build up in security the basis of a better order of things. The basis of the new world order must be national freedom combined with unity and secured by overwhelming coercive forces against aggressors. Where is there any other valid guarantee in sight to quell and discipline the totalitarian outbreaks of thuggism and dacotism which else will precipitate chaos again? “The rapid approximation of Britain and America is more than a means to victory,” Mr Milner said. “It provides a sure and valid guarantee of world stability for sound reconstruction. Both Roosevelt and Winston Churchill grasp this vision. Both realise the momentous significance of the basic spiritual identity of their great peoples and the enormous importance of the pooling of their forces. “What has been done, the RushBagot Treaty, the adoption of arbitration for all disputes, joint participation in the Great War, extension of the Monroe Doctrine to Canada, Joint Military Board for Canada and America, the historic swap of the 50 destroyers for the eight Atlantic bases, the Lend and Lease Bill, provision of American munitions without payment in limitless abundance as the colossal industrial power of America gets properly geared to war economy—all these big doings are harbingers of greater results still, not merely the utter defeat of the world’s gangsters and the triumph of freedom for civilisation, but the building up progressively of a new world order wherein every nation shall have its self-deter-mination and its freedom and fair access to the raw materials and markets of the world. HITLER’S 1941 MENACE. “That is the big job that will tax the energies and vision and liberalism of our two great peoples to accomplish,” Mr Milner said. “At present the task is to stem this britzkreig of Hitlerism. For his 1941 campaign Hitler promises us—(l) an invasion of Britain with overwhelming forces and a mass of satanic paraphernalia; (2) intensified submarine campaign blockading Britain; (3) a drive through the Balkans putting out Greece and rehabilitating Italy; (4) a concurrent Japanese drive in the Pacific. “What he does in the Middle and Far East or even the Mediterranean will not win the war, though if he gets Iraq or Iranian oil it will prolong it. Hitler can do no more in the line of grandiose Oriental stunts than Napoleon attempted and in the end his spectacular diversions will meet the same fate. Oil is to-day the sin ews of the new mechanised warfare. Hitler has not the oil to make good his much-vaunted 1941 campaign, nor un der the strangulation of the Royal Navy can he possibly get it, no matter how his synthetic chemists try to supplement his stores. “If Britain can hang out till September—and who that knows her epic spirit will doubt it ? America will then reach an overwhelming stage in war munition production. On the testimony of its great President America will then be properly geared to her war effort, and Britain will be provided with such a formidable range of equipment for sea, land and air fight-" ing that Germany will takv a frightful thrashing and her morale will soon be sapped. THE LAST BULWARK. “America will not underwrite the British Empire. She has a traditional antipathy to Empire in any form. Not I yet has the meaning of that term as

worked out by Britain been adequately interpreted in the United States. “But America realises that Britain is championing her way of life, the democratic and the liberal life,” Mr Milner said. “She now regards Britain and her Empire as the last bulwark against Hitlerism. She sees through Hitler’s pretentious claim of European integration in his vast European enslavement. Instead of the vaunted Continental bloc integrated for mass economies under a directive mastermind, she realises that this totalitarian subjugation means the destruction of national freedom and of individualism, and the standardisation of peoples in helotage. She knows that its success inevitably spells -her doom, and so she links her lot with ours. BLIZZARD OF MILITARISM. “We are witnessing a great historic happening,” Mr Milner concluded. “We see the most powerful peoples on earth joining forces and resources to vindicate for the world the spirit of freedom and liberalism. Force and freedom can never be harmonised. America and Britain work in unison to lift from the earth this blizzard of militarism and to emancipate mankind from the cruel domination of power-lust that seeks by false propaganda to enthrone the German people over the world. His philosophy is a direct counter to man’s evolutionary progress. It robs human life of all spiritual significance. It antagonises the moral laws that are the product of man’s long experience, and are writ in his heart and in human history alike.

“To end this monstrous perversion Britain took up the gauntlet, and now with the overwhelming support of America’s incommensurable resources, soon to be supplemented by her navy and Air Force, if not also by her army, she will win through in her colossal task.”