Current Comment

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21363, 5 June 1939, Page 6

Current Comment

It is now beyond doubt that nearly 100 men have perished in the British submarine, H.M.S. Thetis, which failed to rise after making a trial dive off Birkenhead on Thursday.

Less than a fortnight ago a United States submarine sank off the New Hampshire coast, the majority of its personnel being rescued by special apparatus which is not part of the equipment in the Royal Navy. These two disasters, coming so close together, make it inevitable that the respective rescue attempts should be compared. It appears to ~’e , .’ e L‘ lt in England, but with what justification Admiralty and other experts must decide, that the crew of the British vesel may have been more luckless than was necessary. Such reaction is unavoidable in the face of a disaster in which hope and despair were so tragically intermingled. For the present the one point beyond dispute is that the Empire grieves for the death of brave men whose courage, one of the rescued reports, remained with them through their shattering ordeal. ***** I hope and believe that the time has at length come for the Western Powers to recover their initiative, writes Mr J. A. Spender, in the Yorkshire Observer. Britain is evidently on much stronger ground than last September. In the subsequent seven months France has had a remarkable recovery and British defensive armaments have greatly advanced. Hitler’s attack on a non-German people has roused the surrounding nations, especially Poland and Rumania, to a sense of their danger and opened up strategic possibilities which were not then in sight. Not least, Mr Chamberlain’s patience in pursuing a policy of peace, though it has exposed him to the charge of being a dupe and a simpleton, has had a remarkable effect in Europe and has convinced immense numbers—even in Germany and Italy—that if war comes it will not be his fault or the fault of Great Britain. Finally, if war had come last September, it would have been possible for Herr Hitler to represent it as an attempt by the Western nations to prevent 3,000,000 Germans from rejoining their Fatherland, whereas if it came now it would obviously be the result of his aggression upon uon-Germans.