CONDUCT OF WAR

Waikato Independent, Volume XLII, Issue 4003, 20 May 1942, Page 3

CONDUCT OF WAR

A JOB FOR EXPERTS PERFECT REPLY TO CRITICS The perfect reply to the uninformed critic who insists either pcblicly or privately what our leaders should be doing in the conduct of the present war, is given by Mr J. A. Spender in the “Yorkshire Observer.” “It is the nature of war that its actual operations must be conducted by experts who seek to keep their plans secret from the experts of the other side and, are, therefore, unable to disclose them to their own people, Mr Spender writes. “ Democracy entrusts the choice of these experts to its Government, and for the time.being trusts this Government to supervise them or supersede them according to its judgment of the whole situation, civil and military, and its knowledge of the resources of the country.

“If a democracy judges that its Ministers are unequal to this task it can change them by a vote in Parliament, but the succeeding Government and the experts it chooses will be subject to the same conditions, and if it proceeds to change these or dictate to them how they shall act. it will be on the high road to the chaos gnd disintegration which means defeat in war.

“Any responsible man who goes to a public meeting to support a demand for a particular military operation spch as ‘ invasion in the west,’ or for that'matter any newspaper which lends itself to an agitation of' this kind, is either innocently or unknowingly undermining the democratic structure.

“Both are claiming for the multitude the right to decide what in the nature of things it cannot decide and what can only be decided by trained minds, with a full knowledge of facts.”