BRITAIN CHAMPION OF NEUTRALS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21560, 24 January 1940, Page 7

BRITAIN CHAMPION OF NEUTRALS

What Allied Defeat Would Mean Fight For Freedom British Official Wireless RUGBY, January 22 The speeches of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Viscount Halifax) and the First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr Winston Churchill), each resounding with determination and setting forth the British case against Germany, and the factors which make faith in victory confident and assured, are applauded by the press, which emphasises that they are complementary to one another. “Viscount Halifax,” says the “Telegraph,” “covered the whole ground while Mr Churchill, with fiery vigour, reviewed the course and future of the war. Into one stern sentence Viscount Halifax compressed our reasons for fighting: ‘I would a hundred times rather be dead than alive in a world under the heel of Nazi dominance.’ That,” comments the “Telegraph,” “is the authentic voice of British character. On the course of the struggle Mr Churchill had much to say of justified good cheer. The destruction of our merchant shipping has been

less than any careful estimate anticipated. This is a record of triumph over submarine and mine and aircraft such as no one of knowledge would have dared to predict in five months.” “ Infectious Confidence ” “The Times” says that Viscount Halifax’s address was imbued with a profound sense of the rightness of the cause for which France and Britain and Poland and Finland also, are standing in arms, and Mr Churchill’s was full of vigorous but not boastful pugnacity and infectious confidence. Particular attention was given by the newspapers to the passages in which Mr Churchill addressed himself to the neutrals. The “Manchester Guardian” says: “It is necessary we should understand and feel with the small European countries in what is for them a terrible situation. We are fighting their battle, and they know it, but in itself that does not help them. We have not used against them, and we never shall, weapons barbarous and abominable which Germany employs to subdue them to her purpose. It is reasonable that we should ask tolerance from them if our fight for existence, and for theirs, subjects them, against our desire, to serious inconvenience.”

“To understand the feelings of neutrals in western and northern Europe it is only needful,” says the “Guardian,” to consider what happened during the past two months, and mention is made of the fact that twice there has been reason to think that Holland or Belgium, or both, were about to be invaded, while in Scandinavia there was a strong fear that the least development in the Finnish war would bring Germany into action. “These anxieties, and everyone in this country will recognise that they are reasonable, have been driven home by the illegal, inhuman warfare which Germany waged on these neutrals, and especially, as Mr Churchill said, against the Norwegians on the sea. We should treat neutrals with all possible consideration, and in return we may ask of them benevolent neutrality.” The “Daily Mail,” endorsing Mr Churchill’s warning that German aggression may very soon make neutrality impossible for the smaller nations, makes the point that “not a single soldier Is under arms in any neutral country in Europe to defend his land because of any fear of Allied action. Even the neutrality that they are endeavouring so hardily to maintain to-day has as its main defence the unbeatable forces of Britain and France. Without the freedom for which we are fighting, neutrality itself becomes for them less than the shadow of the name.”

“Nothing can save their independence but an Allied victory,” says the “Daily Express.” “If Britain is beaten to-morrow, the neutral countries of Europe would be in the German gullet the day after.”