Words for War

Never since World War II started has there been less gun-firing and more tongue-clattering than last week. One after another, high-calibre speechmakers like Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler, George VI, Albert Lebrun, Georgi Dimitroff, Clement Attlee, the Pope, Viscount Halifax, the King of the Belgians, the Queen of The Netherlands, Neville Chamberlain plus generals, dopesters and yes-men sounded off, until old David Lloyd George complained that you did not ask who was winning the war nowadays, but who had said what.

Out-talkingest of them all was Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who, having given a full explanation of how Royal Oak came its cropper (see p. 20), held a pep session on BBC. It contained easily the week's liveliest name-calling.

Fuehrer Hitler was a "cornered maniac," "this monstrous apparition," "that evil man." The Fuehrer and his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, were "those marvelous twin contortionists" and Dr. Paul Joseph Goeebbels and his Ministry for Propaganda and Enlightenment were labeled a "leather-lunged propaganda machine" which indulges in "bloodcurdling threats."

"We have been agreeably surprised that ten weeks have been allotted to us to get into fighting trim," boasted Mr. Churchill. "We are far better prepared to endure the worst malice of Hitler and his Huns than we were at the beginning of September!" If Germany does not choose now to attack, continued the First Lord, "we shall profit to the full by the time put at our disposal. . . .

"But General Goering--beg pardon, Field Marshal Goering, who is one of the few Germans who has been having a pretty good time for the last few years--says that we have been spared so far because Nazi Germany is so humane. . . . When we remember the bestial atrocities they have committed in Poland, we do not feel we wish to ask for any favors."

Mr. Churchill admitted that he had not always agreed with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, although the two had "always been personal friends. But he is a man of very tough fiber," the First Lord added, "and I can tell you that he's going to fight as obstinately for victory as he did for peace."

"They [the Nazis] have not chosen to molest the British Fleet, which has awaited their attack in the Firth of Forth during last week. They recoil from the steel front of the French Army along the Maginot Line. But their docile conscripts are being crowded in vast numbers upon the frontiers of Holland and Belgium. To both these States the Nazis have given most recent and solemn guarantees. No wonder anxiety is great. No one believes one word Hitler and the Nazi Party say and therefore we must regard that situation as grave. . . . If we are conquered, all will be enslaved and the United States will be left single-handed to guard the rights of man. If we are not destroyed, all these countries will be rescued and restored to life and freedom."

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