SAVAGE ENEMY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25208, 24 April 1943, Page 5

SAVAGE ENEMY

NO RULES OR CODE REAL CHARACTER EXPOSED (N.Z.P.A. Special Aust. Correspondent) (.Rec. 10.45 p.m.) SYDNEY, Apl. 23. “The cold-blooded murder of war prisoners, not by officers or men on the battlefield, but as an act of State policy, is something new and terrible even in this dark age in which we live.” This comment on the barbarous execution of the American flyers is made to-day by the Sydney Morning Herald, in an editorial. The paper adds that Australians have been at once revolted and hardened by the news of “this latest incident in the endless Japanese catalogue of bestial crimes.” “The cold brutality of this affront to international law reminds us that we are fighting an enemy who acknowledges no rules or code,” says the Sydney Daily Telegraph. “It is the same enemy who raped and bayoneted civilians at Hongkong, who butchered innocent Chinese at Singapore, who massacred Australian soldiers taken prisoners at Rabaul, and who took the plunge into war by attacking his enemy while his envoys were pretending to negotiate for peace. We should ponder on these stories and this latest ’’exposure of the character of the enemy whose advanced forces are nojp so close to the Australian mainland.

“The Japanese mind is that of a savage inflamed by hate and fanaticism. More than 200,000 of these vicious little barbarians are in a position from which they could launch an attack on our mainland. A deadlier and less restrained enemy does not exist. Some people in this country are not given to imaginings of what would be their fate should the Japanese make a successful invasion. So they continue to strike on the coalfields and argue about methods of working on the wharves and about overtime rates on defence works. The soldier knows better. From personal experience jn New Guinea' he knows that every man, woman and child in this country breathes under the shadow of the greatest ruffians history has known.” Australian papers publish some terse comments on the outrage by American Army Air Corps personnel serving in the South-west Pacific. These airmen, upon whose prowess depends to a “ sinfully unfair degree ” the ' Allied ability to hold the Japanese in the coming air war in this theatre, declare that they will remember their murdered comrades in every battle. With further news of the building up of Japanese air strength in the northern areas, Australians welcome the renewed' suggestions from the United States that there must be “ a speeding up of the deplorably underrated war in the Pacific.” Unofficial reports state that the negotiations in Washington by the Australian Minister of External Affairs, Dr H. V. Evatt, have already reached the stage where the Minister is working out a plan for increased supplies to this theatre. The plan will go before United States officials.

“By*all means let us have a holding war against Japan until Hitler is beaten,” says the Sydney Sun, “but it must be a holding war that holds. In the Battle of Britain three years ago British air fighters fought on the proverbial shoe-string. They never had enough forces to be sure that they would go on holding, nor has Australia.”

The Sydney Morning Herald regrets that Australia’s sound case for more aircraft and increased supplies should have been damaged within America by too vociferous support from political critics of President Roosevelt’s Administration and by formerly isolationist newspapers.