AMERICA TODAY

New Zealand Herald, Volume 81, Issue 24972, 15 August 1944, Page 3

AMERICA TODAY

HOME FRONT PROBLEMSj DANGER OF COMPLACENCY In the first year of tho war in which great offensive victories have been gained American leaders, and to a lesser extent the American people, aro restless and more than a little perplexed, writes Mr Osmar White, a New York correspondent of the Melbourne Herald. It is a restlessness and perplexity which is rooted in the paradox that while the United States is making the most extensive and intensive war effort in history's greatest war the nation is producing all the tools of victory leaning over backward." Competent industrial analysts ,»in Washington, and in the country s great production centres, are agreed that American war industry is now past the peak of its production, not because of economic or technological strain, but because the most elaborate military and naval budgets have been met without further mobilisation of resources.

All that is now needed to win is time and the endurance ol the lighting men and that estimate takes into account the fact that the American theory oj war is to conserve manpower as tar as machine strength can possibly do it. America is like the who "docs not know his own strength and is, therefore, somewhat endangeied by it. . A Niagara-like cataract 01 win material is flowing from this country at every port. You see it assembled in the great, industrial bases along the West Coast and in the laden-down convoys ol mass-produced ships which seem to assemble and depart every day ol the week in the grimy and unlovely harbour of New York.

Spectacle of Production For Id weeks 1 have watched this | spectacle of production and dispatch,! down war's drain, of this most iiiiao.e I industrial treasure, and in the same tu j weeks I have been unable to find anv evidence that the home-front lite ot the American people has been matenaliv affected by this expenditure ot national 'lt' l is true that there are limitations to the production of civilian goods and that tiiere are certain shortages petrol, textiles, electrical appliances, certain varieties of foodstuffs and classes of luxurv services. Ihe public is [aware of them, and there is a pertain amount of war grumbling. Hut to the foreign mind they are not the biting shortages, such as the home-fronts of other combatant countries know evui Australia, which has escaped the gum war austerities of Britain and The result is that the bulk of A Imuran s are lighting this war on an ideological stimulus alone. Thev have not had to lake in more than a modest, single notch in then belts let alone endure enemy bomoing, invasion threats or the prospect ot semistarvation if things did not go well. \n ideological stimulus is a weak thing on which to fight a prolonged war. Difficult for Leaders

President Roosevelt and his team ol industrial leaders on the home front are having an increasingly difficult tme keeping America s "eye on the ball, and it has amazed me, in the past few weeks, to observe with what restraint every section of the American press has featured the excellent news from Europe and the Pacific. It is not because the true significante of this news has been overlooked or misinterpreted, it is simply because newspapers share the national leaders fear that anv exuberance would encom.igt the 1"0 000,000 Americans who are not in uniform to drift hack to peacetime wavs oi living and thinking while tin nation was still at war and victory over i Japan was not in si^ht. : This is infinitely the greatest danger i confronting the United States to-day. j Recognition of it doosnot decry either i the American interest in the war or tin I people's determination to win it, much less does it detract from the overwhelmin, ai ,d decisive contribution of materials and manpower which the nation lias j made to the Allied cause. It is simply a recognition of a human (ruth that it lis hard to reduce your weight it you ! ta..e vour meals in a lavish restaurant. I Materially, America is not in the slightest danger of defeat, but politi- ! rally the outcome of the war is not jet I a foregone conclusion.

Steadying Factor The greatest steadying factor to this nation,"in the throes of its war industry boom, is the families and dependants ot the fh'hting men overseas, upon whom the lengthening casualty lists are weighing more and more heavily. These people are having just as tough nnd anxious a time as the families of British soldiers in the battle /.ones he mere fact that their larders are fu lor and that they are able to aflord a little more luxurv and amusement does not ,j,ke the icy shock out of a telegram beginning "The Secretary ot AN ai rcf The casualty lists are the sole tiling linking the lives of Americans at home with the realities of the war as most of the rest of the world knows it It remains to be seen if this link is strong enough to maintain Americans on a steady "victory" course through the political shoals of a war which they are helping to win without the necessity of enduring great hardships at home.

GERMANY'S HOPES A NEGOTIATED PEACE COUNTING ON WAR-WEARINESS There is no doubt in Washington that Berlin will make some kind of seductive overtures when it becomes evident that the Soviet-American-British forces are irresistible, but before they have carried the land offensive on to German soil, writes the Washington correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor. Reports already in the hands of American diplomatic authorities indicate that such offers arc beginning to sprout in various places and that a real negotiated peace offensive can be anticipated at what seems to ho the most propitious moment. Such a moment would, of course, he when the invasion was experiencing its hardest going, and it seems obvious that Hitler hopes to stall the inevitable sufficiently to turn a military defeat into a diplomatic stalemate ami thus to create such conditions ot peace as would give Germany tune to catch its breath and get ready to try again when some future Hitler has succeeded another Weimar republic. _ Jt seems plain to officials 111 Washington that the Germans are counting on war-weariness among the ueinocijicios, upon political dissension among the principal United Nations and upon an articulate though minority demand for a negotiated peace if there aro serious setbacks. However wrong the Germans may be in judging the state of the Vllieil mind —as they were wrong in judging the British in 19J0—they are counting on these lorces to prepare the soil for the negotiated "peace garden they hope to plant.

DISTRESS IN BENGAL Long before the famine in Bengal had reached its height, the round figure of 2,000,000 deaths was adopted as making an effective platform appeal, and it has been thought necessary to hold last to the reckless estimate in lace of all evidence of its falsity, says Mr Alfred 11. Watson, in » letter to the London Times. Today it is high prices and not actual shortage that maintain distress in Bengal. Throughout the period ot food shortage the much abused British commercial community in Calcutta led a million workers and their dependants through the machinery of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce nt a cost ot millions sterling to the firms participating in the scheme. No other voluntary relief agency lias ever approached this in scale, and of none is so little known.