MEN AND MACHINES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 May 1941, Page 6

MEN AND MACHINES

GREEKS FIGHT FOR FREEDOM. Reporting on the Greeks' fight for freedom as he himself saw it on the battlefront in Albania, Colonel W. J. Donovan. President Roosevelt’s observer in .Europe, said:—lt is astonishing, the job they have done. They really made their fight there with a*rock, a mule and a gun. A rock for a parapet, a mule to carry the stores and a gun or a rifle or a cannon for a weapon. The Greeks had no big war machine. They had no tanks. Except for the aid given them by the British in antiaircraft and anti-tank guns they lacked almost all the weapons that are required in modern warfare, and yet they went into the light. Arid out of this I learned one lesson which I want to tell about. It is this: If you are going to have machines you've got to have the best machines. Second-best won't do. If you can only get second-best it's better to have none, because if you have machines you rely upon them. | And if they are second-best you rely upon them too much and you are overwhelmed by the best. But if you have nothing, then you roly upon nature and upon your own physical resources and your ownbrains. And if you have brains and courage you find a way to I deal with a machine. This war has already disclosed that people can be I too strong in their belief in Maginot Lines and in making Maginot Lines out of concrete and out of oceans and out! of machines and believing absolutely I in the machines and forgetting that I man. who made the machine, if put to it. can whip the machine. Before this' war is over you will see this demon- i strafed.