OUTSPOKEN ARTICLE

Evening Star, Issue 24482, 17 April 1943, Page 5

OUTSPOKEN ARTICLE

"MUDDLING AND lAD MANAGEMENT " ONE HIGH COMMAND ADVOCATED (Rec. 9.30 a.m.) . _ NEW YORK, April 16. "The whole mess in the Pacific smells of muddling and bad management, with a whiff of politics thrown in." says the New York 'Daily Mirror ' in an outspoken editorial. " It is the supreme demonstration of the national need for, first, a true High Command which will run our two great ■wars in "a manner to win the peoples' respect and confidence; secondly, proper realisation of air power as a strategic weapon of final decision; and thirdly, the utter divorcement of politics, or any shadow of suspicion of politics, from the grim business of fighting a global struggle to determine our very survival as a great Power. The Washington attitude thinks that japan will not hit us while we are down. In the meantime General MacArthur and 'a fly swatter' can hold Australia and a vast number of islands against the most brutal and the most aggressive warrior race in modern historv. Washington attitude' now _ bears down on a new tangent—a studied, if not inspired, implication that the mounting appeals for aid from the south-west Pacific represent only a complaining chorus probably staged for effect, and that they are really in no danger. This tangent has received the official blessing of Colonel Knox who said there was no indication of a Japanese naval threat against Australia. Within a day General MacArthur revealed the presence of huge enemy concentrations at Truk and Rabaul. General MacArthur's facts are. unquestionable as to theirintegritv. They have been established by on-the-spot reconnaissance. How pitifully he has been supplied to meet the menace is just beginning to be appreciated Censorship prevents publication of the figures, but none, even Washington, disputes the statement that General MacArthur has been handicapped by an appalling shortage of planes. Mr Stimson's promise that General MacArthur will be given more supplies, particularly of aircraft, is itself an admission that he has not been properly supplied." The ' Mirror ' advocates the creation of a High Command single department to replace the present War and Navy Departments, giving equal representation to air, land, and sea power. Such a command, says the paper, would not tolerate the present ridiculous division of the Pacific war into a navy show and an army show.