SECOND FRONT

Southland Times, Issue 24840, 4 September 1942, Page 5

SECOND FRONT

Demand Abates In Britain (Special Correspondent, N.Z.P.A.) (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, September 2. The clamour for a second front has much abated since the Dieppe raid. The quarterly review, the Round Table, comments somewhat caustically ° n Lord Beaverbrook’s attitude to tne second front. “The man who put himself at the head of the demand for an immediate second front, is Lord Beaverbrook, with that extraordinary tlair of the modern newspaper proprietor tor sensing a popular desire, fanning it to a blaze and representing the dictates ot reason as caution or incompetence, it says. . j The Round Table observes that Lord Beaverbrook’s departure from office has caused no break in his personal friendship with the Prime Minister, Mr Churchill, and that recently one of the special anxieties weighing on Parliament which has little faith in Lord Beaverbrook’s erratic genius as a purveyor of victory, has been a fear lest Lord Beaverbrook and not the War Cabinet or the chiefs of staff might become Mr Churchill’s principal source of advice. Many members of the House of Commons felt chary of the recent long recess. “They were actuated not by a desire for parliamentary interference in strategic planning, but by apprehension as to how the ChurchillBeaverbrook relationship might develop behind the scenes while the Westminster curtain was still down, it says. EXPERT OPINION NECESSARY. Commenting on the second front The Round Table says: “When and how it can be initiated is a question on which no opinion is of any value whatever except that of the few responsible men who are in possession of the full facts. It is difficult to understand the state of mind of those who think that so great an enterprise would have the slightest chance of success if it was launched under the control of men who are capable of letting their judgment on such a matter be influenced in any degree by resolutions of mass meetings or agitations in lobbies. On the other hand, it is rightly the concern of public opinion to demand that the machinery for forming a decision on this high strategic question and many others related to it shall be more adequate in the fourth year of the war than it seemed to be in the third.” The Round Table expresses the opinion that there are four “certain needs for the war’s fourth year:— (1) For the whole plan of war on the technical side to be conceived in terms of the co-operation of all three services and thought out by strategists to the strategic end before being co-ordin-ated with policy by the intervention of any Minister. (2) Production must be wedded to strategy by co-ordination at the highest level, which implies that scientific invention must be raised from a consultative to an executive status in the High Command’s counsels. (3) There is a strong case for vesting ultimate authority in a small number of outstanding minds set free from any other responsibility but that of thinking ahead. (4) British war planning machinery must be fitted at last into that which will evolve the plan of the United Nations.