The New Zealand Herald AUCKLAND, MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1945 MANPOWER QUESTIONINGS

New Zealand Herald, Volume 82, Issue 25172, 9 April 1945, Page 4

The New Zealand Herald AUCKLAND, MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1945 MANPOWER QUESTIONINGS

Two Ministers have on successive days endeavoured to justify the present administration of manpower. These apologetics suggest that the • Government has at last become aware of the general public bewilderment at the incoherence of the manpower administration. The people are puzzled both by the anomalies of individual cases coming within their ken and by the general effect, which is full of contradictions. The statements by Mr McLagan and Mr Semple will not quiet public questionings, because they are curiously unrelated to current world events and world needs. The salient features in today's picture are the imminence of victory in Europe and the world food shortage. The latter if left uncorrected will dim the lustre of the former. Together they have the closest and, indeed, the paramount bearing on New Zealand's manpower policy. Yet neither is taken into account by the Ministers. Are they living in the past? Is the pace of events too fast for them'? They should be given running shoes. Both Mr McLagan and Mr Semple plead that current withdrawals of men from industry are essential to reinforce the 2nd Division in order that long-service men can be released. Everyone will agree that the veterans should be released. They have earned their release, earned it in the field by helping to beat down, pulverise and defeat the Wehrmacht. Their self-won release from their present military assign ment will occur in a matter of weeks, and perhaps days. It is a virtual certainty that their fighting task will be done—and gloriously done—before the reinforcement draft now being drummed up can reach' the division. In such case, it is no wonder the people ask why production and industry are being dislocated by manpower demands, apparently needlessly. As to the need, the people could better judge if they knew the policy this country intended to pursue after Y-E day. What commitments have been made in their name for helping to prosecute the war against Japan, to occupy enemy lands in Europe, or to arrest the famine hands stretched out over Europe and the Far East 1 Above all, what is to be the future role of the division? To these most pertinent questions there are no answers. The Prime Minister prefers to leave the public in the dark. Other democratic leaders are not so reticent. In Britain, Canada, South Africa and the United States, the authorities long since set to work on the problem of the redisposition of force, manpower and industry after the defeat of Germany. They have reached tentative conclusions and made them known. In every case there is to be a partial demobilisation (or remobilisation) of manpower and industry for peacetime tasks. In North America especial emphasis is being placed on an intensified effort to produce foodstuffs. Here there are no known plans, no revised programme to fit the changed world outlook, no new drive to meet strategic and nutritional needs. What is in question is the procedure of continuing to draft men to the Mediterranean. All will hope that the peerless New Zealand fighting machine will not be allowed to run down. But if it is to be kept in commission until V-P day, if it is to be turned against the Japanese enemy, then there is no point in shipping reinforcements to the Mediterranean in order to ship them home again. For if the division is to be employed against Japan, it will have first to return to New Zealand, to train and equip and organise against the new type of warfare and the new demands of the Pacific theatre. Will the Japanese last long enough for all this to be done? None can answer confidently, but New Zealand should energetically proceed on the assumption that she will be in at the kill. What neither the division nor the Dominion would relish would be the relegation of the division to garrison duties. In Italy, there will be little call for occupation troops, let alone a mettlesome shock division. Nor would there seem much purpose in transferring the division to the British zone in North-west Germany. In either case, wastage would be small, thus again putting in question the policy of stripping the home front to provide reinforcements on an active service scale. And if garrison duties are the only employment in prospect, then all will demand that the division be returned to reinforce the production of food munitions in the war against starvation, disease and death. The Allied leaders may go further and assert that the manning of the farms and their auxiliary industries takes priority over any military contribution toward the defeat of Japan. Such a verdict would be accepted reluctantly. But what New Zeala.nders want to know—they have a right to know—is the form of effort still required of them to help finish the war. Then they would wish to see an end made of the present drift, muddle and contradictions; to see, instead, an articulate and rational manpower policy. They are ready and willing to serve, but demand that means be fitted to ends with fairness and efficiency.

MOPPING-UP IN GERMANY

Pursuit, which requires both a pursuer and a pursued, is no longer a correct description of the campaign on the Western Front. Except in front of the Canadians south-east of the Zuider Zee and of the Second Army column moving up the Dutch border to Emden, there is no organised body of the enemy falling back to escape the clutches of the Allied enveloping armour. It is said the only compact group of Germans on the front is that enclosed in the Ruhr whose fate is certain. Elsewhere, resistance is offered by formations of the army and the Volkssturm in villages, towns and cities. They remain to be encircled and destroyed or taken prisoner as at Munster, Osnabruck, Kassel and Wurzburg. The tactics are in marked contrast

to those hitherto employed by the Germans in adversity. Once they were masters of withdrawal actions, fighting desperately in prepared positions and then escaping under cover of darkness when it seemed their destruction was inevitable. What the Germans hope to gain from the continued sacrifice of men and the smashing of their towns cannot be explained by any sound military principle. Plainly it is not war on the»,lines prescribed by the General Staff which, as a body of informed soldiers, must know the time has come for capitulation. The Nazis, of course, might be resolved to drag all Germany down with them since there is nothing left to hope for. But whatever may be German hopes and fears, the fact is that the main task of the Allied armies now is one of mopping-up. Discussion of the Elbe as a rallying and defensive line is fallacious in view of the near presence of the Russians and the absence of the German armies required to man such a barrier. NAVAL HARA-KIRI When Japan has been conquered it may be possible to-learn why her high command sent out the big battleship Yarnato, best vessel of a much-diminished fleet, to certain destruction by overwhelming American air and sea power in the East China Sea. It is suggested by American commentators that systematic bombing of the naval bases in the Inland Sea for a fortnight or more has left them untenable, and that the sortie was made in the hope that the Yamato might meet a fitting end outside instead of being ultimately sunk at her moorings, like the Tirpitz. This is not altogether satisfactory, because the same consideration would apply to the rest of the Japanese Navy, which before the loss of the Yamato was estimated to be no larger than an average task fyce. If hara-kiri was the order of the day, why should not the whole fleet have been sacrificed in one grand immolation ? Whether or not the morale of the Japanese war leaders has deteriorated in the past week, it may be that the incident is a simple extension of the suicide principle from the private soldier in his foxhole or cave to a naval squadron and its entire personnel. What, if anything, the enemy hoped to achieve is not clear; he had no hope of preventing the conquest of Okinawa, around which nearly 400 Japanese aircraft had been lost in belated and equally suicidal attacks. Whatever may be unexplained about it, this victory for American air power raises high hopes for the development of the Far Eastern war on land, secure from effective naval or air interference. There is no doubt that when a landing is made on either the Japanese home islands or the near-by mainland, it will be made in the best possible place, which Nimitz and Mac Arthur are now free to choose.