Evening Post SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1939. DOMINIONS FACE NEW DUTIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 59, 11 March 1939, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 1939. DOMINIONS FACE NEW DUTIES

An increasing measure of decentralisation is one of the outstanding features of Mr. Hore-Belisha's Empire defence policy, and by this j decentralisation the Dominions will be more and more invested with a defence responsibility of their own, as he evidently intends them to be. "It is no longer proposed," says the Minister of War, "to rely upon a single strategic reserve situated at the centre of the Empire." Strategic reserves in the Middle East (including two divisions in Palestine) and in India will in future be vital to Empire defence; but neither these, nor the strengthening of garrison forces at points subject to early attack, will be allowed to "result in a diminution of the cize of the strategic reserve in the United Kingdom." In other words,- none of the strength of the old centralisation will be lost; but the new decentralisation will give an added strength, and, further, will bring home to the Dominions and to the greater Colonies that defence is their affair as well as the Mother Country's. Strategically, decentralisation amounts to a revolution. And morally it will be no less if Dominion peoples grasp its inner meaning. A centralised strategy seemed, in the past, to be a thing aloof. But a decentralised strategy brings the outlying Empire right into the picture. We will be in it, and in no sense looking on. This change is revolutionary from the material standpoint —from the standpoint of the material of mechanised warfare—but * its moral results will be still more important, and may indeed decide the future of the British Empire. First, as to. material: If the new warfare makes it risky to transport armies of men across land or sea dist'anceSj the same risks will attend the transport of aeroplanes, tanks, and all bulky war-munitional requirements. The necessity for using war material as nearly as possible to the place where it is manufactured, instead of transporting it over perilous distance, is one of the vital factors working for decentralisation in defence. Incidentally it works for decentralisation in manufacturing industry, which Australia, more than any other Dominion, anticipated. A "Round Table" writer does us credit in bracketing New Zealand with Australia and India in the following passage:

In the defensive system of which the Singapore base is the main strong point, Australia, New Zealand, and India can play important parts, and are already doing so. They provide, in effect, a reserve of man-power and of machine-power, over and above their ordinary peace-time preparations within their home territories or in their home waters. Of the two, machinepower is likely to prove even more important than man-power.

This passage throws a very heavy emphasis both on the material aspect of the new mechanised warfare, and on the enlarged services that these Dominions are expected to as compared with the obsolete warfare of 1914-18. "Australia's arsenals and aeroplane factories," it is added, "are every whit as important a contribution to British Commonwealth defence as is her navy or as is her militia." And no doubt they are an important contribution to New Zealand defence also. Viewed as a strategic reserve and not merely as a garrison or as a purely local defence, the strength of Australia and New Zealand can still be used oversea, even if not used (as in 1914-18) as far oversea as Europe. The argument of the "Round Table"! writer is fairly consistent with the important speech which the Minister of War has just delivered, and the former has the advantage of dotting i's and crossing t's in a way that a Minister cannot employ. For instance, he divides war-zones into four: (1) London and the United Kingdom, with frontier in France and possibly Belgium; (2) Gibraltar, with the North Atlantic and Mediterranean; (3) Suez Canal, Red Sea, Egypt; (4) Singapore and the southwest Pacific. He concludes that the Domi»ions, with their machine-power and man-power, "can and should play some part in the war-time der fence" of the fourth and the third zones. Defence of the fourth (Singapore) zone is the direct defence of Australia and New Zealand. Defence of the Red Sea zone is a matter in which India is equally concerned; and so, possibly, is South Africa. When the position is dissected in this way, and in terms upon which a Minister of War cannot enter, the moral and material significance to the Dominions of the new. decentralisation policy—in its strategic reserve as well as in its local defence aspect —becomes very plain. It is within the power of the three anti-Comintern Powers to compel the British Empire to fight a decentralised

war new to Empire experience. Defeat would be ruin, but victory would add immeasurably to the Empire's expectation of life and will to conquer.

Do the people of Australia and New Zealand realise how little they have contributed since the Great War to the defence of the Red Sea and Singapore zones, or even to the Singapore zone itself? Of the cost of fixed defences, they have borne nothing except the Singapore Base contributions. Australia has also contributed munitional manufacturing enterprise. Should the next war involve the Mediterranean but not the Pacific, Australia, India, and New Zealand might have in the Red Sea and the Middle East an opportunity to strike a decisive blow, ending a possible deadlock in the region between Suez and Gibraltar. This is the tactical problem that the Allies averted in 1914-18, when Italy was induced to forsake the Triple Alliance. Not in his latest speech, but in an earlier one, Mr. Hore-Belisha stated that "the problem of holding positions is not, in the same degree as it was, a problem of personnel." This was interpreted as meaning that the days of millions of entrenched men are gone. But trench-defying air warfare has created so many new soldier jobs in air-raid defence at home, and modern warfare generally calls for so much industrial mobilisation, that universal service is more than ever imperative; and today, more than in any previous age of military conflict, the prize goes to military and industrial preparation. It has been well said that "the war of the future must have been won before the first blow is struck, if it is to be won at all." Measured by this acid test of preparedness, where does democracy stand today? And where would it have stood last October if the Chamberlain Government had chosen the path of military glory, instead of taking courses that permit the Minister of War to make his momentous decisions under the shelter of a continuing if still precarious peace?