Nelson Evening Mail WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 1944 SUPPLY AND MANPOWER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 12 January 1944, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 1944 SUPPLY AND MANPOWER

A LINE-UP on the supply front is being undertaken by the mission from the Eastern Group Supply Council, India, which is now in the Dominion, following a visit to Australia. Originally formed to co-ordin-ate Empire war supplies east of Suez, the Council comes very appropriately into the picture now that India is the base of operations • for Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten’s SouthEast Asia Command. In addition to our respective commitments in the South-West and South Pacific, Australian and New Zealand resources are being tapped to furnish requirements for another front against the Japanese. New Zealand’s major contribution will naturally take the form of food and other primary products that go to brace the sinews of war. It is very unlikely that arms and equipment or service manpower are being requested of us. The leader of the mission (Mr I. F. L. Elliot) epitomises the main purpose of the tour when he says that “the present situation requires the most careful allocation of manpower to the most essential classes of production.” The visitors arrive at a time when we are deeply immersed in the problem of ekeing out a very limited manpower and womanpower pool so as to cover present commitments. A resurvey of it in the light of new conditions is supposed to have been proceeding for the last two months, yet there is so far no reorientation of policy to show that definite interim conclusions have been reached. It must be patent that fast-moving total war requires a periodic check-up on the direction our dovetailed effort is taking. If tanks can move smartly down the priority list before Australian factories built to make them can get into full production, the indications are that other schedules drawn up even a year ago will require readjustment. It is misguided patriotism to delay in withdrawing some of our irons from the fire when we find that, in the changed circumstances, they are not supplying as much heat to the war as they might if used in some other way.

In the fifth year of conflict United Nations are not short of fighting men. They do not lack equipment, except perhaps in particular lines. Our great industrial partners, among whom Australia now ranks, are living up to their promises as the arsenals of democracy and the trend of the war shows that we can best serve the common cause by becoming one of its Pacific larders. We are specialists in that line of total war and should at this stage concern ourselves with giving the maximum help in the sphere for which the Dominion is best fitted. Obviously that is the implication of Mr Elliot’s remark about allocation of manpower. Under the advice of the chiefs the armed forces the Government seems diffident about shortening up on our military obligations, feeling perhaps that this might be interpreted as shirking a duty. It could not be if our programme was fitted into the common plan and we were told that henceforth food was our job. The people, too, although naturally full of admiration for the man in the front line, should come to realise that, whatever may have been the case in the past, the worker in factory or on farm who is producing the where-

withal to fight, the Japanese is obeying orders and practising the role allotted to him. While we are proud to acknowledge what our fighting men have so far achieved it must also be realised that our military contribution cannot be on a grand scale when compared with the millions now in the armies of the United Nations. Our greatest service in the field has been worthily rendered. If we are called now to undertake a more mundane but no less important task in the common programme, we should do it. Neither should the Government be squeamish about telling New Zealand that it is summoned to man the food front. That would entail a readjustment of priority calls on manpower, with the armed forces moving down the list and primary production installed very near the top. It would also enable that part of our military programme we do retain to be properly manned. If the silpply mission’s visit hastens crystallisation of a revised Dominion manpower policy in the light of present and future —not past—needs, it will have done us a good turn in tidying up the loose ends of manpower distribution which is too much a thing of bits and pieces devoid of much conscious concentration. United Nations have left dispersal of strength well behind, whether at the point of impact with the enemy on in that essential supply and communications network which leads from the remotest farm up to the front line and takes in all the manifold links on the way.