The Wilmington morning star., 1940-06-29
Editorial Comments
From Other Angles
THE DEFENSE OF BRITAIN
New York Herald Tribune

What prompted Senator Pittman, at just this
critical hour, to give out a press statement ad'
vising Great Britain that she is totally unpre'
pared for Defense that no available American
aid can help her and that she had better give UP
the fight at once and send her fleet to protect
the Western Hemisphere, we do not know. But
it is possible to ask whether any statesman
making such a declaration, could have the faint
est conception of the desperate realities now con
fronting the 46, 900. 900 inhabitants of the British
Isles or the immediate and desperate urgency
of this issue for the whole future of the United
States.
Senator Pittman has surely followed the
! course of the Petain government in France. He
has surely read the terms of the armistices which
it was led inevitably to sign once it had begun
the process of surrender. How he can imagine
that by now urging the British into defeatism
Generalization and flight he could leave open any
chance, even, of securing their fleet as an ad
| junct to Western Hemisphere defense, it is i'm
possible to conceive. While the British people
are resolved to defend their island, there is real
chance that this last, but powerful, bastion OF
the Western democratic world and the great
fleet which still guards it can be held. Once that
proud and courageous defiance is cracked by de-
featism or despair, the collapse will be as swift
and uncomfortable as it has been in all the other
victims of the Hitlerian advance. Not only will
there be no Britain left; there will be no fleet,
and there may not even be any empire.
The United tates has no means of itself de-
Tending this last bastion of Europe; it will not
go to war in the attempt and it believes that if
Britain should fall it would still have time and
could summon the resources to prepare itself to
Withstand the tremendous pressure that would
then fall directly upon the United States. But
all this is no reason for giving away the bas-
ton in advance, for telling the British that they
are beaten anyway, and advising them to save
the remnants while they can. 1t seems incredi-
BILE that a chairman Of the Foreign Relations
Committee could blandly thrust such a state
ment as this into the moral back of the British
defense. just at the moment when Britain is sum-
moning all the unity and doggedness she poss-
esses against the forces Of compromise and de-
featism from which no society is free.
If her people will it, Great Britain can be held.
Her great navy and magnificent air force are
formidable obstacles to the Hitlerian invasion,
and can certainly halt it for a time. AS long as
the British people see any ultimate hope before
them-and they can pin such a hope on increas.
ing material aid from the Americas, permitting
them to maintain the blockade and more and
more nearly to match the Hitler air force -
the islands can be held permanently and can
yet become the base from which the vast Hitler
power may ultimately be destroyed in it's own
contradictions. For Americans deliberately to de-
stroy that hope is a piece of defeatist folly which
would be unbelievable if it did not Sc exactly
match all the folies which have brought the
democracies over the last seven years to dis
aster.
The British Isles can be held; a resolute PEG.
pie is still resolved-and not defensively but ag-
gressively resolved-to hold them through every
thing that may be sent against them. Can this
country. In reason, do anything less than send
them every aid, short Of war, in support of that
magnificent resolve?