HESITANCY!

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 41, 17 April 1942, Page 4

HESITANCY!

NO doubt we can fight! That lias been proved beyond a doubt on a hundred bloody fields. British nature however seems ever loath to start a fight. The average Anglo Saxon would rather be battered into insensibility than take the advantage of an unprovoked attack. This laudable trait in our make-up is ail very well in times of peace. In fact its perpetuation is worth fighting for. But to-day when the mask of hvpocracy has been torn from the faces of our foemen there should be no further need for it. To-day the peoples embroiled in the new world war stand on the threshold of a new and more dreadful clash of martial power than has been. 'Listening to the distant cannonading in Soviet Russia, the peoples of England, India, America and Australasia know full well that the vortex of the cyclone must inevitably grip them before it passes—and yet, and yet! Only now the awakening mob conscience of the aliied nations is clamouring for offensive. Only now are the slow moving official channels becoming cognisant with the facts that this new war machine sponsored and trained by the Axis nations, can only be beaten by dogged attack after attack. The Air Force is working upon the lines which should be taken up by the army—for as yet the Nazi fighting forces have never, during the two and a half years of war, felt the full weight of Britain's concentrated might. Japan likewise can only be beaten by attack and the world ampitheatre awaits impatiently for the first signs of the long overdue Anglo-American offensive. To date the: enemy on all fronts has succeeded in taking the fight into our territory, leaving his own untouched, except for bombing raids. He has yet to feel the stigma of invasion which he has carried into a score of other countries. The British attitude up to the present, as each catastrophe succeeds the last, seemed* to be embodied in these words—gentlemen, let us take, our losses like GENTLEMEN.' Too much of the scholarly atmosphere that gave birth to red tape, silk hats and monacles. Not enough of the determined aggressive spirit, exemplified by Drake, Howard, Nelson on the sea and by Cromwell, Marlborough and Wellington on. land. To-d.ay with a new and ominous lull upon us; with the Japanese consolidating their newly acquired gains and the Nazis preparing for their desperate new spring offensive we appear, true to colour—hesitant, uncertain, unwilling to strike. Why? There may be every reason.. There may be and possibly are vast possibilities in the near fture,, but two and a half years of watching a swaying battle in Libya, gives rise, we maintain to a legitimate query as to when the. British war office will become an active, hundred per cent belligerent.