WIN WAR QUICKLY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 63, Issue 4462, 11 August 1941, Page 2

WIN WAR QUICKLY

“ENORMOUS HURT.” What is important is not merely to win the war, but to win it quickly, says the Sunday Times. Every day that it lasts enormous hurt is being done to the heritage of Europe’s civilisation. Take the question of buildings alone. Under the conditions of air war buildings, of no military but much cultural importance are bound to suffer accidental ’ damage from time to time. But under the German mode of waging air war—which is to fly over the centres of great cities and there bomb indiscriminately from a great height—their destruction becomes not an accident—but a system. The only limit is the duration of the attacks. The more nights the Germans fly over, the more treasures perish for ever. But take another question: the barbarities daily wreaked on some of the iconquered nations. What the Germans have done in Poland during the last twelve months is perhaps the worst horror that any white people have ever perpetuated. And it still goes on. Death by starvation; death by exposure to cold; death by torture and outrage unspeakable; the purposed extermination not of hundreds of thousands but of millions. To cut short even a month of that agony would be a mercy beyond computing. Crime so monstrous cannot triumph. Hitler will be defeated. But the sooner the madman is caged the better for the world and its future. At present he runs furiously amok, ruining the heritage of past centuries and sowing broadcast for future ones the seeds of new and terrible hatreds between peoples.