Lothian to the U.S.

It is now nearly five months since I made a public speech in the United States. Since then, I have been home to consult with my Government and to find out for myself how things were going in Britain. I want tonight to give you some of the conclusions I have formed.

In these last five months there have been tremendous changes. When last I spoke we had just experienced the terrific shock of the overthrow of France. Hitler seemed irresistible. First Poland had been overwhelmed, then Norway, then Holland, then Belgium. Finally came the destruction in less than a month's fighting of what had been rated as the finest army for its size in Europe, and the disarmament and division of France.

Further, Hitler had announced that he would dictate peace in London in August, or at the latest by the middle of September. And had not he always been right about his military dates? Was it not certain that England was going to be conquered and that with Hitler's crossing of the Channel the end of the British Commonwealth would come?

If these were the gloomy prophecies in circulation about us, there were hardly less gloomy speculations about the future of the United States. If Hitler conquered Britain, the British Fleet would be sunk or surrendered or scattered among the British nations overseas. Yet was it not clear that American security required two fleets, the British Fleet, based on British blocking the entry of hostile European fleets into the eastern Atlantic, and the United States Fleet predominant in the Pacific? It was this dual system which protected the Monroe Doctrine and which alone could keep war distant from American shores.

That, too, was the time of the gloomy revelation in the press that the United States was as unprepared for modern war as all the other democracies had been. The prospect, therefore, before the United States, if the British Fleet was sunk or surrendered or sailed away to the outer parts of the British Empire, was not rosy. With Hitler and Mussolini's navies and the remains of the French Fleet based on the eastern rim of the Atlantic and on strategic islands well out in the Atlantic, would not the whole American Fleet have to come back to the Atlantic, leaving the Pacific, both north and south, at the mercy of Japan?

Turn for the Better. But that grim picture has been dispelled, at any rate for the present, by the action of the people of a small island in the North Sea, nobly and valiantly aided by the young nations of the British family across the seas. First, there was the retreat from Dunkirk. Then came Mr. Winston Churchill. Then came the brutal bombing of London, but there was no flinching.

And finally has come the gradual petering out of the much heralded invasion of Britain. That invasion was really broken in the great air battles, when Hitler tried to beat down our Air Force and open the way for his ships and his troops.

If Hitler won the first round of the great battle which began in Norway in April, we have won the second. For without the conquest of Britain, Hitler cannot win the war.

The Program of Naziism. But the war is not yet won. Do not think that Hitler and Nazidom are going to be easily overthrown. Hitler is certainly going to make another attempt next year--and earlier rather than later--to beat down our resistance by new methods and still greater violence, and so open the way to world domination for the Nazis.

I do not think that even now we realize the true nature of National Socialism. The triumph of Hitler no doubt grew out of the despair which settled on Central Europe in the long years of war, defeat, inflation, revolutionary propaganda. That was what gave Hitler his chance. But modern National Socialism is the reassertion of the .strongest tradition in German and Prussian history--the belief in the all-powerful military state, creating order and discipline at home by ruthless Gestapo methods and expanding its wealth and power by ruthless conquest abroad. We have almost lost the capacity to understand that war and conquest can be regarded and preached as heroic and legitimate ends in themselves.

Hitler and his Party are not concerned to bring about juster frontiers in Europe between free peoples or a fairer distribution of colonial territories between the leading nations of the world. Their object is to subjugate others so that they and their resources can be organized on totalitarian lines for the benefit of the German military State. Hitlerism cannot stop and become peaceful. Nazi Germany is organized for war and totalitarian economics and for nothing else. Its economic system, like everything else, is built on fraud. War and preparation for war are its only real remedy for unemployment.

This war, therefore, is not a war between nations like the last war. It is more of a revolution than a war--a revolutionary war waged by Hitler and his military totalitarian machine against all other nations and the free world in which we have lived, so as to make them military, political and economic satellites of a totalitarian world empire. Then, Hitler will have given the world peace--the peace of death --and employment, the employment of a slave.

The War Ahead. It is quite obvious that the only way of stopping the expansion of the Hitler Europe is to confront it somewhere with a power possessed of superior armaments and an impregnable strategic position.

Hitler, as we have seen, has lost the second round of the war. But we think that he certainly is going to renew the attack on Britain with all his might this winter and spring. Everything else is for him a side show. But if he can destroy Britain, he and his friends will have won the basis of world domination. But this time he is going to concentrate on the sea. He has failed to overwhelm us in the air and we are sure that he will continue to fail, while with your help our power to hit back with our bombers will steadily increase. But he is building submarines and long-distance planes with all his might and main with which to bomb the convoys and to announce their location to the submarines. He will base them on all the ports and airdromes along that line which runs like a vast semicircle round Britain, from Narvik down the northern and western coasts of France to Spain. He will have two new 35,000-ton battleships, the Tirpitz and the Bismarck, and other vessels in the North Sea early next year. With these he will try to deliver a knockout blow at our communications so as to prevent us getting the food, the raw materials and airplanes necessary to enable us to continue the war at full strength.

The danger, of course, springs ultimately from the fact that in the last war we had the support of the Japanese, the Italian, the French, and, after April 1917, of your Navy, whereas today, since the disappearance of the powerful French Navy, we are fighting alone. Our Navy, therefore, with the tremendous tasks which rest upon it, no one of which has it shirked or evaded, is strung out terribly thin.

We think that this is a situation which concerns you almost as much as it concerns us. It has long been clear that your security no less than ours depends upon our holding the Atlantic impregnably and you the Pacific. So long as this is so, the way of life to which we are attached can continue and our free economic system can resist totalitarian attack. But if one of those two navies fails, the unity of the British Commonwealth begins to disappear, control of the trade routes begins to pass to the Axis powers and those controlling bastions of sea power which now keep war away from America become the jumping-off point from which it can be menaced.

We have no illusions, therefore, about 1941. It is going to be a hard and a dangerous year. Our shipping losses have recently been formidable. In one week British, Allied and neutral losses were nearly 200,000 tons. We are suffering, on the average of October, 200 civilian deaths and 300 civilians mutilated every night from enemy bombardment, and our food supplies are gradually being more strictly rationed.

The Strategy of Democracy. But we are not in the least dismayed. With help from you we are confident that we can win, and win decisively in 1942, if not before.

But on the side of armaments also, we have great and growing assets. The curve of our munition and airplane production is steadily rising--despite the bombing. The number of our divisions, of our airplanes, of our pilots is also steadily going up.

What is more important, the young nations of the Commonwealth, Canada. Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, are fast getting into their stride.

The whole of this growing aggregation of power is now being mobilized. Its first task is to defend that great ring of defensive positions which lie around you, Britain itself, Gibraltar, Cape Town, Egypt and the Suez Canal, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. If Hitler and his friends could smash through these great positions his power could begin to spread over Africa and the Pacific; it would make the problem both of security and of bringing the war to a victorious end immeasurably more difficult. But as long as we can hold these positions, we and the democratic world beyond them are safe.

Our second task is to enable us to deliver increasingly formidable blows at Germany itself, at her allies, one of whom is already beginning to crack, and to bring assistance to the subjugated peoples now once more beginning to show signs of a resistance to Hitler's will.

But that result is not yet secure. It will be put to the test in 1941. If we can now stave off the attack on Britain, if we can last out next year still holding all the positions I have mentioned, Hitlerism in the end must go down unless Admiral Mahan is all wrong. By ourselves we cannot be sure of this result--though we will try our best.

The U. S. Decision. It is not for me to try to tell you what you ought to do. That is entirely for you to decide for your selves. But it is my business to see that you are informed of the essential facts because unless you are so informed you cannot form a judgment and I, and not you, would be responsible for the consequences. Hence this speech tonight. You have already declared your interest in the survival of Britain. It is for you to decide whether it is to your interest to give us whatever assistance may be necessary in order to make certain that Britain shall not fall.

Nobody who. like myself, has seen what the steady and constant bombardment of great cities from the air means, could wish any friendly country like the United States of America to undergo any similar experience. You and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and probably South Africa have the chance, if you take it, of saving yourselves from being the theatre of total war. You are the centre of that great ring of fortresses, Britain, Gibraltar, Cape Town, Suez, Singapore and Australia, I have mentioned, to which I should add Hawaii and Panama.

So long as these fortresses stand, the war, with its aerial bombardment, cannot in any real sense of the word roll up to your shores or devastate your towns and cities.

But if ramparts fall the war will inevitably cross the oceans and roll up against your shores. If Britain and the eastern shores of the Atlantic and the islands which lie off its shores fall into the dictators' hands, or if you are unable to defend the island fortresses in the Pacific, then the jumping-off grounds go against you, the oceans become a passageway, and your power to strike back at an enemy disappears because you have no bases from which to do so.

The more people think about the future the more they are drawn to the conclusion that all real hope depends upon some form of cooperation between the United States and the British Commonwealth of Nations.

The Future. The plain truth is that peace and order always depend not upon disarming the police but upon there being overwhelming power behind just law. The only place where that power can be found behind the laws of a liberal and democratic world is in the United States and in Great Britain supported by the dominions and in some other free nations. The only nucleus round which a stable and peaceful and democratic world can be built after this war is if the United States and Great Britain possess between them more airplanes and ships of war and the key positions of world power, such as I have described, than any possible totalitarian rival. Then, and then only, will political and industrial freedom be secure, and will it be possible for a free economic system to prevail against the economics of totalitarianism.

The issue now depends largely on what you decide to do. Nobody can share that responsibility with you.

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