The Timaru Herald TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1940 An Open Letter To 1940

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21850, 31 December 1940, Page 6

The Timaru Herald TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1940 An Open Letter To 1940

YOU may, or you may not, recall these words of Charles Lamb in his essay on New Year’s Eve, but they are timely: “Of all sound of all bells (bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven), most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past/twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected —in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies.” You will find it hard to put yourself in a mood of critical appraisal, but there is not a thoughtful person in the civilised world who will hesitate to usurp this personal private function for you. All will be ready enough to say what you have “done or suffered, performed or neglected.” Not in a mean spirit of graceless condemnation do we say that your passing will go unmourned. In ordinary circumstances the flight of time nourishes feelings of sober reflectiveness and regret, but on graver occasions its swift passage is welcomed. You will expect no sorrow at your ending, for in your bewildering course you have tested the endurance of all nations, all peoples; you have been freighted with staggering miseries; you have bruised and torn with unreasoning mercilessness; the world is glad you are dying because few guests have so thoroughly outworn their welcome.

When you took arrogant possession of the field a year ago everybody was still wondering how the Second World War would develop. There was unceasing talk of the stalemate oh the Western Front. No development could be expected there. The magnificent army of France stood in and behind the Maginot Line just as Hitler’s legions were similarly fixed behind their Siegfried Line. Nothing could happen until one side or the other made a move, and since any move would inevitably be hazardous, nothing was done. In the meantime, of course, small nations bordering on the German frontier had their just cause for apprehension, but in those days at the beginning of your life there was still pathetic faith in the security of neutrality. But before long the opening move was at last made. Germany launched a flank attack against the Allies through Norway. A startled world then knew for the first time what Hitler’s vaunted secret weapon was. There was no novelty in it; that weapon, the deliberate and cunning weakening of an opponent by sapping him from within, is a device as old as warfare. The Trojan Horse technique had merely been reapplied on a larger scale, and with results remarkably satisfactory to Nazi Germany. The cunning man, however, rarely becomes complete master of any situation, and so it was proved by Hitler’s Norwegian campaign. He overran the country, as he set out to do, but he gained that overlordship at a damaging price. The German navy had to be used to support the invasion; that gave the British Navy the opportunity it sought. Some of the most useful ships Hitler had were sunk or damaged, and the culmination came when units of the Royal Navy avenged the gallant sacrifice of Captain Warburton-Lee, V.C. by sinking seven enemy destroyers at Narvik.

Then came another ominous lull. The conquest of Norway brought Germany no closer to her selfchosen enemies; she had to try again and May 10 saw the opening of a decisive phase of the war, a phase decisive for France, but not for Great Britain and her allies. The German hordes swept through Holland and Belgium and so swiftly was this movement executed that the French Army, taken by surprise, began to wilt. The Germans broke through, having a way pounded for it by a vastly superior air force supporting the most powerful mechanical units ever seen in battle. It was a smashing military victory, one which a France internally torn and irresolute, could not survive. But again Hitler was deprived of the full fruit of his triumph. The British Expeditionary Force, left unprotected on one flank by the withdrawal of the Belgian army from the battle, was trapped. That, at least, was what the Germans thought. But the British troops, supported by friends from home who came to their succour in every kind of craft that would float, escaped through the hell of Dunkirk. The German army showed the world what a Blitzkrieg was, but the feat of the British troops will occupy a higher place in history, and a special and abiding fame was won by the 3,000 British soldiers who held the vital citadel at Calais to cover the withdrawal of the whole Expeditionary Force. Of that 3,000 it is thought that there may be 30 survivors now prisoners of war. You will see that all through your year Germany has not been able to round off her successes. The supposed masterstroke always fails. Why this should be so is plainly seen; there is something in the British spirit which can be summoned like water from a deep and pure well.

The ultimate goal of Hitler, the one he hoped to reach in your life, was the subjugation of Britain. He had all the advantages he could wish, but he was to learn what an English poet knew long before: “In day of war we are as one. And hard it is, to fight against a stone.” The whole country stood ready to meet the Germans on the shores of England should they, in a freak of weather, cross the Channel unobserved. The Germans did not come by sea, but they did come by air ,and in the air they suffered their first major defeat of the war. True it is that grand historic architecture has been blasted; thousands of British civilians have lost their lives, and thousands of others have lost their homes. But their spirit has not been broken and their hope for the future hag never been higher than it is now. You, 1940, have produced the greatest trials that the people of Britain have ever had to undergo, but Hitler, the man who has always been frustrated at the moment when the greatest triumphs loom mirage-like near his hand, is only learning that the capacity for inflicting suffering upon an enemy does not mean that you can triumph over him. Brutishness, dn short, will not prevail. That is the message of hope you have carried with your cargo of sorrow.