Mexborough & Swinton Times – Saturday 13 September 1941

Which Nobody Can Deny 

Churchill does his best to alloy our gaiety with grimness, but “cheerfulness will keep breaking in” and Mr. Churchill “could not deny” that the war has lately gone better for us, especially in the Atlantic.

Our losses are down to a third of the enemy’s, and yet it was the Axis who undertook to win the war by wiping out enemy shipping. Losses at sea are not so important to the earthbound Nazis as to the amphibious British, but they are gravely inconvenient, and in the Mediterranean a military factor of major importance. It is too soon to say that we have won the battle of the Atlantic, but we are on the road to mastery there, thanks to the increasing help of the United States; , whereas if Hitler’s schedule had been kept the British life-line would have been severed by now.

We have to thank Russia also for this revelation of the relative impotence of the U-boat without air support. The withdrawal of that support is due to Hitler’s decision to fling everything, ‘ including the Luftwaffe, into the struggle with Russia. For that reason we must be no more complacent about the respite afforded to our convoys than we are about the respite afforded to our towns.

Victorious or not in the East, Hitler will turn again, almost certainly to the West but nothing can take from us the use we have made of the interval, both on land and sea.