JOB WILL BE DONE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4429, 23 May 1941, Page 5

JOB WILL BE DONE

BATTLE OF BRITAIN. FULL PRICE OF FREEDOM. • [By Leland Stowe, one of America’s best foreign correspondents. This is one of his series of uncensored despatches, writ- ■ ten after 17 months in the crucial sectors of the war.] She really saved my life on the home stretch. To look at her, you’d never think it, because she wasn’t very big. But she had all kinds of courage and as a travelling companion under wartime conditions she was the tops. I know because we put in a solid week together, zig-zagging from a Gold Coast port up to Sierra Leone West Africa. Nothing seemed to faze that girl and she had a wonderful name, tpo. It fitted her just like Ginger fits Rogers. It’s a darn shame not to be able to tell you—but you know, all this wartime secrecy. She was a little British cargo boat and I’d like her to live a long, long time. That little ship deserves to live anywhere from one to 100 years longer than Adolf Hitler, because Adolf keeps gunning for her, and she never gets a chance to shoot back. She taught me what the blackout is like at sea, and in the seven days of our partnership I got to know her captain and crew pretty well. Sometimes they are away from England for two or three months at a stretch, running the gauntlet of Nazi U-boats, picking up all kinds of cargo sometimes inflammable cargo such as we had—and then racing for home with squadrons of German dive-bombers to dodge on the final lap. Every time her crew gets home again they don’t know whether they’ll find anything but a rubble of ashes and bricks where they lefi their houses. Until they go back and walk up the street, they never know whether the missus and the kids will be there —or whether there have been funerals in the family. “THE DAUNTLESS MARY.” We may as well call her the Dauntless Mary, for Heaven knows, she is all of that. Her skipper is a mountain of a Yorkshireman, with a jaw that’s a blood-brother to Winston Churchill’s. When he talked about the home front, the skipper’s voice, accent and all, was the voice of England. “They’ll never break us with their bombs,” the skipper used to say. “We’re goin’ to beat Hitler. I tell you, the people of England ’ave set their teeth to it. You ought to see my old woman. She’s MAD!” You could talk with any man on the Dauntless Mary and you heard the same story. There was no doubt, either in their eyes or their bones. Now they were homeward bound. They were going home to the bombings and they could scarcely wait to get back. It is idle to discuss Britain’s position in this war unless you recognise clearly that modern wars, more than any in the past, are decided in great measure by fighting hearts and civilian morale. , That is why England is still an independent nation, despite the' terrific odds which she faced. Perhaps the greatest advantage ' possessed by the British to-day is the ruthless fact that they are fighting for their lives and their existence as an independent parliamentgoverned people. A SINGLE ALTERNATIVE. They have had to start with only a single alternative—submission and slavery or ultimate fredom at whatever cost in health and blood. That was the only alternative the Finns and the Greeks had, and it was also their deepest source of strength. Right now the British do not possess “alternatives.” They have no alternative but to fight and fight and fight. That is why, unless I am much mistaken, that they will have a good many alternatives to-morrow—at the latter part of this year and throughout next year. Britain’s allies are not simply exiled governments in London. Britain’s most important allies are millions of people in every Nazi occupied country in Europe, from Norway to Rumania and Bulgaria. After working and living for seven months in the Balkan countries, I know from personal experience that all the Balkan peoples, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, or what,' are overwhelmingly anti-Nazi and proBritish. From the lips of many Italian Fascists I know how deep they hate Nazi-Germans. Now that German troops and aeroplanes have to stay in Italy to keep Mussolini in power, the long-term result is inescapable. , • MILLIONS EAGER TO JOIN BRITAIN. If the war goes through the summer the day will soon come when the Italian people will leap at the chance to fight with the British and against the Nazis, for their own liberation. . As for the Norwegians, Dutch and the Belgians, they are only waiting for the opportunity. A great many Frenchmen already feel the same, and a great many more will feel that way six months from now. For the immediate future everything hinges on the Battle of Britain. So long as Britain receives evergrowing quantities of aeroplanes, guns and other war materials from the United States the Battle of Britain will not be over- in a hurry. The British- people are steeled — ■ as never before in hundreds of years of their history—for suffering, anguish, destruction and something else. The something else is the FULL PRICE OF FREEDOM. Besides this dominant, all-em-bracing factor, speculation about future strategical possibilities shrivels to its merited proportions. We have seen what the British people are capable of doing and enduring.

I am convinced that what we shall yet . see Will dwarf all they have done since last June. Providing only that America sends the “tools” to Great Britain, I am convinced that the- job will be done.