South Yorkshire Times, September 26, 1942

The Need for Speed

At Stalingrad the struggle for dominance now seems to have become a Street by Street affair. Russian stubbornness has never been more grimly shown than in this ghastly battle. The moment at long past and Stalingrad retained any importance as an industrial city, a cell in the productive organism of the Soviet. German artillery has ploughed up its streets and squares, dive bombers have tumbled its factories and houses into dust or engulfed them in flames, and tanks trundle into the suburbs nosing for chinks in a defence line which uses every mound of shattered masonry as a strong point, every recognisable Wilding as a fortress.

Stalingrad is worthless to the Russians in every sense but one. Its continued resistance spells time; moments, hours, days, weeks saved which the Nazis might be utilising in the furtherance of some other project designed to encompass the ultimate annihilation of Russia as a military power.

The contest for this great riverside city reflects in awful concentration how time has taken the place of space as the prime factor in warfare. Swiftly ranging mechanised conflict makes light of territorial gains and losses; time, soon or late, overtakes with exhaustion the side whose will, resources, and ingenuity cannot sustain the deadly grapple for victory.

But time is not only vital for the Russian; it is a factor of the utmost importance for the whole of the United Nations. Striking first with well prepared blows the axis powers of sees much of what they originally sought. Every day that passes this strain every nerve to consolidate these gains. Firmly plant inside Europe and the British lines of the far east, they do not await complete victory before starting on this tempting meal.

While with one hand they continue to strike at their adversaries, with the other they are mercilessly claim the life out of their conquest. The Nazis synths dramatically starve the Poles, transporting millions from west to east, where they cannot sustain themselves, and colonising the spaces is cleared with Germans.

In Czech Slovakia the same sort of colonisation goes on; living space for the “Herrenvolk.” To make room for these cuckoos in the nest Czechoslovak’s are imported into Germany by the thousand as slave labour.

Through the evil offices of Laval, Hitler seems to do much the same thing with Frenchmen. Already several thousands are embodied in the war production machine of the Reich, but insatiably it craves more.

In plundered Greece disease and starvation are rampant, while throughout German-occupied Europe the Jews are pitilessly harried into extermination.

In the East, Japan fattens on the fat lands she has over-run. No leech ever stuck harder to its victim, nor sucked its blood more avidly. Not victory only, but speedy victory by the Allied powers, will stop this fiendish exploitation. The will to resist still smoulders in these occupied countries, the spark is there to be fanned into flame. But we must above all strive to strike our blow before these embers grow cold, perhaps for ever.

We must speed the ships, speed the tanks, speed the planes, and most of all speed the plans to counter the foul corruption by which Germany and Japan seek to rot the very souls of their victims.

South Yorkshire Times, September 26, 1942