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To meet this challenge, Sir Andrew Cunningham brings all the traditions of the British Navy—and no institution in the world has so many. Among them is the command of great words: like Nelson, Sir Andrew uses simple, direct, clear phrases, but phrases shot through with the humble thing which throughout the ages has inspired poets as good and as bad as Aeschylus and Felicia Dorothea Hemans. On his great job. Sir Andrew has said a round dozen of great words. His last signal to his ships referring to dive-bombers in Sicily said: "Italian or German, these pests must be swept out of the sky."
"Britannia Rules." Whatever the eventual decision between plane and ship the crisis in the Mediterranean was last week near its climax. The decisiveness with which the Royal Navy pressed ahead seemed designed to force the enemy's hand. Adolf Hitler could not ignore this growing boldness much longer. Soon it might have a disastrous effect at one or both of two crucial points: in Italy, in France.
Winston Churchill put this possibility into taunting words last week:
"It is right that the Italian people should be made to feel the sorry plight into which they have been dragged by Dictator Mussolini, and if the cannonade of Genoa, rolling along the coast, reverberating in the mountains, has reached the ears of our French comrades in their grief and misery, it may cheer them with the feeling that friends, active friends, are near and that Britannia rules the waves."