MAKING UP LEEWAY

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 249, 18 July 1942, Page 7

MAKING UP LEEWAY

British* Adaptation To War (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, July IG. The Minister of National Security, Mr. Herbert Morrison, said in a statement that today was a test of Britain’s capacity to wage and sustain thy war with skill and efficiency that overmatched the enemy’s. “In this struggle for victory,” said Mr. Morrison, "it is a test of war machines —from the organization at the top to the arms that are put in the hands of the individual soldier in the field. To reshape the whole pattern of our society and adapt it to the i>urposes of war is a thing much easier to deal with in after-dinner oratory than to bring about in fact. Germany today is a product of a revolution, and a war-making revolution at that. Even so, it took her six and a half years of concentrated totalitarian effort,' under the lash of dictatorship, to bring herself to the point where Hitler was ready to attack. “It is little more than two years since Britain faced the full measure of her task and bent her whole energies of mind and will to the tasks of war. Not so soon, nor .so easily, can we make up all the leeway that afflicts a peace-loving nation which was too slow to realize the world’s lapse into gangsterism. The training and equipping of a vast, military machine for land operations is in part a matter of trial ami error. The Germans have had I heir trials and errors. ,'l’hey had them in Spain, and they profited from revelations of weakness —-in their tank design, for instance —while we had to wait until the supreme test of total war for the opportunity to learn from corresponding experience. “Victory depends just as much today, though in a different way, upon the thoughts and deeds of the people of our country—the rank and file as well as the leaders.” Mr. Morrison said in conclusion: ‘A righteous and courageous policy is a great inspiration to a nation in days of hazard. We have indeed been a Imppier people in the three years since September, 1939, than in the three years before then.”