AMERICA’S DEFENCES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 December 1939, Page 8

AMERICA’S DEFENCES

CONSIDERED INADEQUATE gloomy picture. ARMY HELPLESS AGAINST INVASION. A gloomy picture of the defences of the United States was painted by Mr Bernard Baruch, a capitalist who was Director of War Industries in the Great War, and is expected to occupy the same post again, states a New York correspondent. After conferring with President Roosevelt, he urged the United States to create immediately an army, navy and air force, so strong that no Power or possible combination of Powers would risk attacking the country. "There is a definite possibility, he said, “which we must prepare against,' that a combination of Powers might attack us on one or both oceans in the not distant future. God help the United States if they ever get by our one-ocean navy! They have what seem to them reasonable inducements. They might try to take our vast resources from us. Our army, as General Pershing and the present Com-mander-in-Chief, General Drum, said recently, is, to put it mildly, veiy deficient, and unable to put up any real defence against a strong invasion. The tragedy is that everyone knows it except the people of the United States. Every foreign Power knows it. DEFENSIVE DEFICIENCY. This is no reflection on the personnel of our army, but it is pitifully small, untrained, and lacks modern arms and up-to-date munitions. Up to the present time, our whole system of national defence has been based

on maintaining a navy, good enough and strong enough to delay an enemy Power landing on our shores until we could raise, train and equip an adequate army, which would take a year, at least. For the first time, that is no longer sufficient defence. We have a good, one-ocean navy. But recent political realignments in Europe and Asia have opened up the possibility let us pray it is not a probability that a combination of Powers coujd attack us on both oceans, simultaneously, without interference from . the British Navy. "In the last war.” he added, "it took us more than a year of costly : effort to create an army, and there was greater waste of life and money ; because of its meagre training and equipment. We have still not taken far-reaching steps to organise an adequate national defence against all possible contingencies.” While declining to go into details, he said that plans for preparedness, thus far initiated in Washington, although large, were inadequate in scale, both as to industria mobilisation and the creation of defence man-power.

LATIN AMERICAN TRADE. How to keep the United States out of the war, which is the prevailing topic from Maine to California, from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande, presents no problem to Mr Baruch. Foreign trade should be concentrated, he said, as much as possible, in Latin America. United States producers and exporters must exercise self-discipline to keep export prices to Latin America down to a level which would make it enduring and keep competi- | tors out of the Western Hemisphere. The United States could destroy the barter system introduced by Germany by keeping prices so low that the Latin Americans would always want to trade with the United States.

"Our policy," he concluded, "should be ‘justice, backed with might. Neutrality will be just what the United States makes it. The Secretary of State. Mr Cordell Hull, has announced that we will stand on our rights under international law. and I have unlimited confidence that he will make that policy a just one. But. realistically. those rights will be what we make them. Both the Gormans and the English will hesitate to risk trouble with us by interfering with our

foreign commerce. if we .ire right, backed with might. I believe this would bo a groat step toward keeping us out of war.”