ALLIED PLAN FOR VICTORY

Timaru Herald, Volume CLIII, Issue 22492, 29 January 1943, Page 5

ALLIED PLAN FOR VICTORY

What Of The Pacific?

A Burning Question In Australia By Telegraph—N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright (Rec. 8.15) SYDNEY, Jan. 28. “Co-ordinated aggressiveness is henceforth the Allied order of battle. In the scheme of global strategy formulated at the Casablanca conference, priority must be given to the European theatre. But the war with Japan can no longer be relegated to a holding operation. The promise of maximum aid to China pre-supposes the reopening of the Burma link as a prelude to blows at the heart of the Japanese enemy. In the Pacific emphasis must be upon naval and aerial activities aimed at the severance of Japan’s long lines of communication and at closing in upon the Japanese mainland.”

This Australian appreciation of the great allied plan for victory is made by the military correspondent of the “Sydney Morning Herald.” Keenly alive to the dangers of allowing Japan to consolidate and develop her Pacific and Asiatic co-prosperity sphere, Australia will watch eagerly for concrete evidence that this theatre is not overlooked in the new strategy of global war.

The “Sydney Morning Herald” editorially applauding “this most momentous conference,” declares of the Pacific that “a partial diversion of the Allied naval and air strength now within the framework of agreed global strategy might save great loss and bloodshed later on.”

That the Japanese have enormously strengthened their South-west Pacific defensive arc running through an unbroken chain of more than 2000 miles of island bases from the Celebes to the Solomons is the inescapable deduction to be drawn from General MacArthur’s communiques of the last few weeks. The thickening line of enemy airfields and naval bases under our continual air attack tell their own plain story of the Japanese development of a great fortified ring around the conquered territories. Australian war observers are far from being assured that these Japanese efforts have a purely defensive purpose, but have been designed primarily to permit the unhindered exploitation of the resources of the Netherlands East Indies and Malaya. Australia’s Fears Mr Curtin reiterated Australia's fears when he told the assembled Federal Parliament “there is no portent suggesting that the enemy has had a rebuff sufficient to deter him from the task he has set himself.” At a subsequent press conference the Prime Minister elaborated this statement when he said: “In their past offensive moves the Japanese failed to gauge the strength of the Allied resistance, but with a stroke of luck they might have a major concentration stronger than the resistance we could offer. Australia fears the present Japanese shipping and plane concentrations as just so offensively designed. While such fears of a new major enemy drive may be exaggerated, it is clear that Australia’s healthy realism towards the Japanese menace has nothing in common with the earlier complacency which proved so expensive to the Allies. It is absolutely certain, too. that the enemy efforts around the periphery of their entire South Pacific and Indian Ocean domains are on a greater scale than ever before. Heavily manned and well-stocked Japanese bases could quickly be converted from defensive to offensive purposes. “Australia recognises that the Allied island hooping offensive against Japan is merely a temporary palliative not the final solution of Pacific strategy, but her war observers believe that additional air strength in the Pacific would weaken the Japanese hitting power before she could execute any exisiting threat. Were 50 bombers to attack Rabaul and other enemy bases mentioned in the daily communiques where 10 attack to-day, Japan’s attritional losses would almost certainly be such that she could no longer think in terms of expanding her conquests. Finally and irrevocably she would be forced on that defensive which is an essential preliminary to inevitable defeat. It is widely hoped in Australia that a minor outcome of the Casa ■ blanca conference may be the provision of just such additional air strength.”