CURTIN PROTESTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 22, 27 January 1943, Page 5

CURTIN PROTESTS

STRATEGY IN PACIFIC

DANGER OP A HOLDING

WAR

(By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright.) (Special Australian Correspondent.) (Rec. 10 a.m.) CANBERRA, Jan. 26. A strong protest against the relegation by the United Nations strategy of the South-West Pacific to a holding war was made by the Prime Minister, Mr. J. Curtin, in a broadcast tonight to the people of Australia and the United States. The South-West Pacific, he said, was too crucial to be left to a force of caretakers, and a holding war policy meant that Japan was buying cheaply the time she required to exploit her new resources for an onslaught which the United Nations would find costly to fight. Mr. Curtin outlined the part the Australian forces have taken on sea and land and in the-air and the sacrifices that have been made by her sons, and said: "I would hesitate to delineate what has been done but for the fact that it is necessary to show that we are far from being helpless and inefficient moaners in the face of the enemy. We have paid a price for our seal of nationhood. We have paid it cheerfully as a free people in a free cause, and we will go on paying it, but it is also the charter of our right to share, in the common pool of Allied resources. MORE STRENGTH NEEDED. "In point of strategy, the preservation of Australia is vital to the United Nations, for the earlier the attack against the heart of Japan the less costly and the more decisive the result will be. "I put it to the American people. The men of Corregidor can be avenged only if the naval and air strength in this theatre are adequate to the plans of the commander. Any other conception of strategy involves the Pacific becoming a defensive front until the-United Nations have achieved victory everywhere except against Japan. Neither Mr. Churchill nor Mr. Roosevelt has placed a time limit on the war against Hitler. Whatever that period may be, and however long it may be, it will be a period during which Japan can build to a strength that may well make her impregnable. Mr. Churchill and Mr. Roosevelt know the Australian viewpoint; it is no insular submission. Just as we agreed from the very moment Hitler struck at world freedom in 1939 that we must contribute our share in global war, so we say that global war involves the, South-West Pacific theatre as an integral part of the total conflict. It cannot be left to an obscure afterwards. "Greater air and naval strength to support the forces now fighting would have an immediate and significant impact on the Japanese plans and . would enable co-ordination of Allied fighting power to be brought to bear at places and in point of time where their striking power could well be decisive."