EVENING POST THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 1942. PHANTOM FEARS, OLD AND NEW

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 142, 18 June 1942, Page 4

EVENING POST THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 1942. PHANTOM FEARS, OLD AND NEW

We do; not think that it is necessary to draw a pessimistic conclusion from the review of the war position offered to Australia and to the world j>y the Commonwealth Prime' Minister. Mr. Curtin has a tendency at times to put facts nakedly, and not everybody can face naked facts; but if the public could be brought to see this war in its nakedness, and to look on its realities without jumping to tendentious conclusions, public opinion would become a great deal steadier, and less of a problem to Governments and to itself. A steady public, opinion is one of the weapons with which war is made. In so far as it affects public opinion- throughout the United Nations generally, Mr. Curtin's review should have a nerving and certainly not art unnerving effect For | reasons of his own* he chose to make his review in June. And to that there is" no objection. But June, in a northern hemisphere war, must always be a dynamic month. If an elaborately prepared aggressor is not active in June, he is a very poor kind of aggressor. Hitler would hot be Hitler if he were riot striding out in June. - Consider, for instance, June, 1940. Hitler was then reaping the political results of the military collapse of France. The French were forming for him a servile Government. What a triumph! And, at the same time, what a blunder! To set out the bird, lime for the birds of Bordeaux, Hitler tarried long enough to be too late in his air-blitz Battle for Britain. A political success in France, but an irreparable mistake otherwise* marked the first June of Hitler's war. When the second June came (1941) the mistake had been discovered; to repair it, Hitler attempted the boldest stroke of his career; in June, 1941, he attacked Russia. But this super-blunder, far from removing the wreckage of the first blunder, merely condemns Hitler and Germany to face a third sanguinary June, with blood flowing copiously in Libya, and much more copiously in the greatly prolonged attempt to over« throw Russia. A June reviewer, if he casts his vision back, sees the public in June, 1940, tortured by nightmares of an invaded Britain; but it did not happen. Equally a June reviewer, if he looks back only a year or less, will see public opinion in all the free countries tortured by the fear that Hitler was. actually doing to Russia in 1941 what he had done to France in 1940. Are memories so short that the predictions that Russia would be out of the war by August, or by September, or by Qctober, are already forgotten? Have people already forgotten the pniahtprnlcliaracter^of flic fears of 1940 and 1941?: 7 In 1940 Hi|ler Tailed to do to Britain %hat he Had done to France. In 1941 he failed to dp. to Russia what he had done to prance, and he further involved hiniself in a continuous blood-bath. In 1942 he is" still failing. He is not'failing so completely as to be unable to renew his drive in •Russia—such an inability would constitute a failure too abject for words —but he is taking up his heavy Russian task at a point at which his prospect of success, is distinctly poorer than it was twelve months ago. However-much a nervous observer may work on his own fears, he will not be able to persuade himself this June —as he did last June—that Russia must fall by September or by October. Those old nervous twitches are gone; and if people inclined to be nervy will remember the routing of their torturing fears of yester-year, they will surely be able to fortify themselves against a fresh recurrence of any such debilitating symptoms. Having regard to the whole circumstances of the war, how can any reviewer be either alarmed or alarming if he finds that, in the third June, Hitler is again trying to drive through South Russia to the Caucasus and through Libya to Suez? Surely these attempts are the least that Hitler expects of himself, and we df him. What is happening in this June, at the very worst, is nothing amiss if compared with the woes that apprehension pictured a year ago. All the worst has never happened. It never will. Let us get on with the war!