South Yorkshire Times – Saturday 16 May 1942
Voice of Victory
It was the voice of victory which we heard on Sunday in Mr. Churchill’s ringing broadcast. His message was indeed one of good cheer as much in manner as in matter. There was a zest in his utterances and a grim confidence which heartened his hearers even as it must have impressed upon the feverish Nazis the retributive imminence of their own day of reckoning.
The masterly summary of the hard and heavy times through which we have passed, the days when defeat stared us in the face as we stood alone, but when “no wavering voice was heard”; all this was done in the Prime Minister’s inimitable phrase and tone, punctuated with many a raking aside like the reference to the “Italian miscalculator” and the ghastly winter to which Hitler’s intuition condemned Germany’s Eastern armies.
There followed the promise of an even heavier weight of bombing by the R.A.F., soon to be added to by the American bombers. We may yet see the fires of Hamburg, Rostock, and Lubeck pale before a fiercer frenzy of havoc as the partnered might of the two greatest air forces in the world scatters ruin and desolation over the rest of Germany’s industrial towns. It is a prospect which Hitler can hardly have contemplated when in the high ecstasy of his hate he sent the Luftwaffe to mangle and murder almost without aim or object. Doubtless he is already longing for some of the planes and bombs so prodigally squandered in those days.
But now the sands are running out and, guarded though Mr. Churchill was in that part of his speech in which he mentioned the “militant aggressive spirit of the British nation.” the words were spoken with a scarce subdued sense of elation pregnant with possibilities of action. Earlier he had said that we are now well armed and had mentioned the overwhelming resources at our disposal. No hint was given of where the shattering stroke generated from this massive power will be made. Already the Germans and Japanese, their first impetus on the wane, have suffered damaging counter blows. Hard driven as they are they drive themselves more desperately in a wild race against time.
The Allies stubbornly resist and inexorably prepare. Russia’s vital part in the war has ever been a prime consideration with Mr. Churchill. His division of the struggle into phases the third chapter of which he described as “The Russian Glory” thus gave due stress to his well-known views on the value of Russian resistance. The great store set by us on its continuance was grimly exemplified in the threat of the use of poison gas. The Red armies may have this most debased of scientific weapons of war to face as the Germans frantically try to forestall another grisly Russian winter. The Prime Minister made it clear that though we shall never resort to the use of gas unless the Germans use it first, we shall treat the unprovoked use of it against our Russian ally exactly as if it were against ourselves.
Hitler now knows that if he has recourse to this last and filthiest expedient, in the same minute he condemns his people to retaliation in kind. And there is every reason to suppose that we are ready at the word of command to drench the Reich with this “ghastly dew” in a fashion which even German thoroughness will not outmatch. The cards are on the table now. The warning is to us as well as to Hitler for it is certain that he would not confine the horrors of chemical warfare to the Eastern front once the irrevocable step had been taken.
No one welcomes the implications, but we cannot afford to neglect any move which will help Russia. Her fate is too closely bound up with that of the other Allied nations.
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