JAPAN’S TREACHERY

Waikato Times, Volume 129, Issue 21601, 11 December 1941, Page 5

JAPAN’S TREACHERY

LONDON PRESS COMMENT ALLIES’ SERIOUS TASK .Culled Press Assn.—Klee Tel. Copyright, LONDON, Dec. 9 The speeches yesterday .of Mr Churchill and President Roosevelt were greeted today by the whole press in a tone of gravity which befits the extension of war to the world. Condemnation of Japan’s treachery in its surprise attack, bearing suspicious relationship to the accustomed Nazi technique, is combined with the comment that the attack on Pearl Harbour resembles the heavy blow delivered, against the Russian Fleet in Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. The Times emphasises the seriousness of the task before the Allies.

The Times says: “The United States, now becomes the focal post between the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of the Pacific, and the war on two fronts, even if only one of them is a shooting front, must strain resources that are not yet by any means fully mobilised. Of one thing indeed we may be confident — the war, particularly against such a dastardly assailant, is already rallying the enthusiasm of the American people, and will call forth from American industry a response of production comparable with that which was evoked from a sluggish England by the imminent national peril after Dunkirk. Diversion of Supplies “But it is too much to hope that, at any rate at first, such enhancement of effort can compensate for the necessary diversion of war supplies—including that most strained and least elastic supply, shipping—from the assistance of Great Britain and Russia to maintenance of America’s own campaign in the Pacific. Great and invincible are the new allies that we gained, and they are certain to prevail in the end against the new enemy as well as the old. But we dare not deceive ourselves by imagining that any new weight is thrown immediately into our side of the balance. “For the present we shall receive less from our friends and must be prepared to do more for ourselves. We must face greater privations and labour more mightily than ever before.”