South Yorkshire Times – Saturday 03 January 1942

We See Our Way

The Western Hemisphere has received large infusions of the Churchill spirit. The Premier has addressed during one historic week the United States Congress and the Canadian Parliament. His voice, thrilling with determination, has uttered new defiances to the common foe, and this time not in the name of Britain or of the British Empire alone, but in the name of the anti-Nazi universe, in the name of thirty nations determined to root Hitlerism out of the earth.

Mr. Churchill visited the United States at a time of great perturbation, and he did the Americans good. Now they know what the Churchill spirit meant to us after Dunkirk and during the Battle of Britain. The Premier’s speech in Canada was a tour de force and will be awarded a high place by the historians of the war. To call it a fighting speech would be to imitate Mr. Churchill’s own sardonic under-statement. It roared defiance and vibrated with confidence.

“Brutal arrogance” is what the Italians called it, and certainly no race has had more experience of brutal arrogance in this war. If the Italians can stomach the occupation of their country by the Hun and still call a Churchill speech “brutal arrogance” the war must have destroyed not only their sense of humour but their sense of proportion, and their sense of values. However, the Wop Flop, and what it feels about the war, is not at present important.

Mr. Churchill surveyed the variegated scene with his usual candour, from the sombre situation in the Far East to the gleaming dawn of supremacy in Europe, and left us in no doubt of the immensity of the task still confronting us. But he that shall endure to the end, the same shall be saved. The very organisation of our might, the mere assembly and deployment of our powers, is a task of supreme difficulty.

Our strength, wealth, numbers, are greater than those of the Axis ; we have only to contribute them unsparingly, to co-ordinate and combine them so that they conform to a single plan, and this mighty Nazi conspiracy against the peace and liberty of the world will be smashed. It is already being smashed in Russia and in North Africa. In time the long arm of the Allies will reach it everywhere and pulverise it with a thousand blows. Much has to be suffered before then, many set-backs and disappointments ; not only have we to regain much that is already lost, we have to face the possibility of further loss, particularly in the Far East, while our war potential is growing.

The road up the Hill Difficulty has been long and hard but we are at the crest, and at last we see our way.

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