THE TASK AHEAD

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 77, 9 October 1942, Page 1

THE TASK AHEAD

AMERICAN SUMS UP WHERE WE HAVE FAILED SO FAR This article was the principal part of | a speech delivered in Australia by the Director of the United States Lease - Lend. Mr William S. Waaaerman. but though it refers to Australia, many oi tlie references it contains arc equally applicable to New Zealand. Americans have no axe to grind but the Axis. Wc are not here to defend Australia, but to use Australia as a base for offensive action against the enemy. I Very few of us have yet realised how very serious an effort is going to be required to win this war. It is almost impossible for most people living a long way from the actual battlefield to have any realisation of what totalitarian war actually means or the extent to which ! the enemy will go to accomplish his j ends. We think that we art making sacrifices here if we submit to a smaller ration of tea or give up the use of our motor car, but we have no realisation of the sacrifices that the enemy is willing to make to achieve his victory. We consider that we have done well if we work 10 or 12 hours a day live days a week, when the enemy will put in a 14-hour day seven days a week and live on half of what we look upon as the sheerest necessity. And the reason for this, of course, is that it is just beyond our ability to imagine what will happen to us if we los*. or to envision so much better a life than we have had so as to be stirred to that tremendous will to victory that makes such sacrifice daily routine. WHY WE HAVE LOST SO FAR 1 am going to give a few examples of why we have lost to date. 1 am not going to try to pin the blame on anybody. We all share it. There was a certain airfield where the runways were too short. Because of the shortness of those runways three very precious planes had their landing gear partially destroyed so that they became temporarily useless for combat service. I do not know whether those runways have yet been lengthened. I believe they now have, but I do know that it took some weeks after the event even before the work was started. 1 can assure you that if those runways were either in Japan or Germany they would have been repaired and lengthened during the night; and that if it were necessary to take a whole city or a village out to do the job, those runways would have been repaired.

We have not realised that time i. almost our most precious commodity. It is a commodity that the enemy has used to his greatest advantage; and until we rcllly get a sense of urgency we are not going to win. 1 wish a full report on the operations at Singapore could be in the hands of every general and every official who has anything to do with the conduct of this war, so that we might benefit from the lessons learned through the tragedy of thnt unhappy city. Overconfidence, lack of co-ordination, lack of proper authority, wasted time and carelessness, are at the bottom of that defeat. NEED FOR CONSTANT ALERTNESS The other day I motored through the countryside and passed an airfield; lined up neatly along the airfield were approximately 20 training planes—all ready to be destroyed by a single burst from enemy gun fire, should a raider appear. I turned to the man I was riding with, an official of the Government, and said—“ Why don’t you go in to that airfield and raise Cain’’” and he said—“ The manual states i.iu* aeroplanes should be scattered only when planes are located in combat zones.” “But,” I replied, "there is no such thing as a combat zone any longer; the whole country is at war, and must be rated as a single combat zone.” Secondly, why should not we implant in the minds of every young aviator the lessons learned from actual combat, that for every plane destroyed in the air up to date, at least 10 have ben destroyed on the ground, and that it must become second nature for every pilot to think where he can hide his plane upon landing, so as best to protect it from an unexpected enemy raid. We have been beaten so far because we will insist on thinking of this war in terms of previous wars. We still have the habit of two dimensional warfare, when it has become three, with the third, namely, air, the most important. Our enemies have won because they were the first to recognise the change and because they were willing to scrap out-worn traditions and leaders, and put into command young men unafraid to use new techniques. EXAMPLE OF THE RUSSIANS When the Russian campaign first broke out and most people in my own country were predicting that Hitler would go through Russia like a knife through butter, I had a firm belief that the greatest surprise of this war would be Russia’s resistance. The basis for that belief was not any military knowledge that I had and that was not available to the man in the street, but the fact that I had been lo Russia and that 1 hnd seen developed in the people there a sense of sacrifice that convinced me that when put to the test they would put up a resistance that would amaze the world.

I remember one evening sitting having dinner with a young girl whom my wife had brought in, who rather casually remarked that her husband had been killed the day before. He had been a fanatical communist and had been caught in Hungary where communists are not tolerated, and sentenced to death. She then remarked that she hoped to take his place, anti when I turned to her and said —"If they caught him, don’t you think they would catch you? And what chance of life would you have then?” she replied—“ Yes, 1 expect to be caught within a few weeks or a few months, but at least if I live a few weeks and do my job properly, then 1 feel certain my life will not have been lived

We are up against a tight where no j sacrifice, no effort on the part of our | enemies is too great. 1 have been told by some of General MacArthur’s men who have returned from the Philippines that when there was a job to be done the Japanese would work 18 hours a day. I do not propose an 18hour day, but 1 do propose for all of u.s fighting against this horrible evil of slavery and dictatorship that we contribute some of the same zeal, some of the same intensity, and some of the same fervour that we find in the ranks of our enemies. BELIEF IN A BETTER WORLD One thing has puzzled me a great deal. In many quarters I find, instead of a hope for a new dawn that may arise for mankind as Ihe result of an Allied victory, merely an unenthusiastic resignation to the tact that the world has changed and that one has to make the best of a changed world. That point of view seems to me to be out of keeping with the great possibility that we have before us of really making a better world for everybody to live in. I wish that every one of our soldiers could feel that he is fighting not only to ward off the evils of slavery and defeat, but to make a world that

oflers hope and freedom for all of mankind. And when l talk o! ftaadoi i I talk of freedom not only in the sense of the concept of the world lhat we ; have been accustomed to. meaning .freedom of speech, freedom of woi- | ship, freedom to change out rulers ' when wc m (St, but alto two typ* of freedom that are equally important' • Freedom from the fear of want, a sense of the obligation of man to man —freedom from any tyranny that man ! tries to impose on man, including the tyranny of government. But I want to talk a bit about freedom front want, because it as the fear |of wanting that is at the root of a good many of our troubles. Most people I don’t realise that we have had a revoI lution in America, and it is a levoluJ tion that was brought about chiefly i by the depressions and by the realisaj tion that no State can survive which | has too great a proportion of its popu--1 1. lion unemployed. So. in the extremes of our necessity ! we finally turned to the weapon of govI eminent employment, and we began to realise that our own concept ol a laissez fairc economy in an upset world j had to be considerably modified, that | v could no longer rely solely upon the law of profit, because, in tunes of con- ; tinuous disturbance, the possibility of : profit is so uncertain that no careful j individual could invest his or the i other person’s savings with that del gree of safety that private iuvestment t calls, for. So, we realised at home that under those conditions the pri- ! vate profit system had to be augmented by a system of public investment and ! that in the long run the wealth of a 1 nation consists of only one element — the ability of a nation to combine its manpower* with its natural resource*

into a-sustained production. PRODUCTION IS THING THAT COUNTS In other wolds, and 1 think Hitler had something to do with teaching us this, we have learned that the thing that counts is not gold in the ground or money in the bank, but production. We must fit our system into an organisation that will create not only the highest production, but that will also see to it that the fruits of that production may be made available to the nation as a whole. This does not mean for one moment that we should

sacrifice the profit motive or private enterprise. I believe it is only under private competitive enterprise that one gets the efficiency of production that is essential to a high standard of living. | But we must realise that the thing that defeated the system of individual enterprise was not alone the excessive selfishness of the 1920’s but the resultant excessive caution of the 1930’s which prevented the flow of capital into new enterprise and brought on a | hoarding movement that completely cured this hoarding by public spending of our hoarded savings which reversed the downward spirit of unemployment. There will be many times in the future world when public spending will be absolutely necessary to keep private enterprise going and to keep our employment at a high level, i lam hoping—and here lam speaking ! purely as a private citizen that America will have learned a few lessons from the failures of the victory of the lost war and from the experience of this war. and that we may have learned to accept the responsibility that will come from victory. PLANNING FOR BETTER FUTURE Practically, -I hope that the technique of lend-lease may enable us to accept the responsibility of taking a large part of our international income in goods and to be prepared to make continuing loans in the shape of material, with a small return over a long period of years, because we can maintain a high standard of living for ourselves and for the world at large only if we are prepared to do our share in expanding world trade and in developing the less developed regions of the world. In this development some plan must be followed so that we do not cause either unnecessary duplication or the building of an industry in one region when it is best to have that industry lin another. It would be well to have (an exchange of products from each nation best equipped to produce a particular product. But we will have to guard ourselves against the form of competition which uses a low standard j labour payment as its chief competitive ! weapon. If we are to throw open the tariff gates wider, we have to have some guarantee that we are not going to compete against longer hours or lower wages than we are accustomed to. This in itself presents a delicate problem in which some compromise becomes essential, because unless we permit greater freedom of trade to some of the low labour standard countries there is no chanca of our raising thenliving standards. Here the technique of lend-lease may again be of use. Let us take China: By developing through the lending or leasing of American material the transport system of China, we would immeasurably raise the possibilities of a higher standard of living. China would 1 have more to give to us and more to take from us. and so in our future lend-lease programme we must not think in terms of only the immediate return but in terms of long range return and of social values as well. We must realise that if we keep our factories busy and our people fully employed by lend-leasing some materials to China o n which at first we may get but a small return, there are bigger returns in the offing, as well as the immediate return of keeping ourselves fully employed. We have a great job ahead of us. A job that will offer work to everyone, and if we will use our intelligence and work with our heart as well, we can make a better and a happier world.