SIX MONTHS OF WAR

Waikato Times, Volume 130, Issue 21655, 16 February 1942, Page 6

SIX MONTHS OF WAR

CHURCHILL’S REYIEW BRITAIN’S GREAT TRIAL [Ommi wireless) (Received Feb. 16. 3.15 p.m.) RUGBY, Jan. -15 “Nearly six months have passed since at the end of August I made a broadcast directly to my fellowcountrymen,” said Mr Winston Churchill in a broadcast tonight. “It is therefore worth while looking back over this half-year of struggle for life—for that is what it has been, and what it is—to see what has happened to our fortunes and prospects. “At that time, in August, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr Roosevelt and drawing up with him the declaration of British and American policy which has become known to the world as the Atlantic Charter. We also settled a number of other things about the war, some of which have had an important influence on its course. “In those days we met on terms of a hard-pressed combination seeking assistance from a great friend who, however, was only a benevolent neutral. “In those days the Germans seemed to be tearing the Russian armies to pieces and striding on with growing momentum to Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov’, and even farther into the heart of Russia. “Daring Assertion” “It was thought a very daring assertion when the President declared that the Russian armies would hold out till winter. You may say that military men of all countries, friend, foe and neutral alike, were very doubtful whether this would come true. “As for us, our British resources were stretched to the utmost. We already had been for more than a whole year absolutely alone in the struggle with Hitler and Mussolini. We had to be ready to meet a German invasion of our own island. We had to defend Egypt, the Nile Valley and the Suez Canal. Above all we had to bring in food and raw materials and finished munitions across the Atlantic in the teeth of German and Italian U-boats and aircraft, without which we could not live or wage war. “It Seemed Our Duty”

“It seemed our duty in these August days to do everything in our power to help the Russian people to meet the prodigious onslaught which had been launched against them. It is little enough we have done for Russia, considering all she has done to beat Hitler and for the common cause.

“We British had no means of providing effectively against the new war with Japan. Such was the outlook when I talked with Mr Roosevelt in the middle of August on the good ship Prince of Wales, now alas sunK beneath the waves.

“It is true,” continued the Prime Minister, “that our position in August, 1941, seemed vastly better than it was a year earlier, when France had just been beaten into the awful prostration in which she now lies, when we were almost entirely unarmed in our own island, and when it looked as if Egypt and all the Middle East would be conquered by the Italians, who still held Abyssinia and had newly driven us out of British Somliland.