Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1942. AMERICA AT WAR.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 February 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1942. AMERICA AT WAR.

from its interest as a broadly comprehensive survey of the war situation at the stage to which it has been carried, and not least in its authoritative exposure of the fantastic rumours that have been circulated on the subject of the damage done by the .Japanese in their treacherous attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, President Roosevelt’s broadcast on Washington's birthday was noteworthy on other grounds. It ■was one of the most direct and simply-worded expositions yet. given of the Allied grand strategy in the war, and of the principles on which that strategy necessarily is based.

Trampling, as it were, on the last dying embers of isolationism in the United States. Air Roosevelt made out in masterly fashion the case for maximum co-operation between the free nations in the war against criminal aggression, and did so in terms which should carry conviction to the mind of every right-thinking man or woman in the United States or in any other country. Declaring that he had the mass of the nation with him in the policy of seeking out the enemy in distant lands and distant ■waters, the President justified that policy not only or chiefly from the standpoint of sympathy with the victims of unjust aggression, but rather on the ground that in no other way could the United States really defend itself.

Great and exacting calls are now being made on the United States, not only in extending warlike operations far beyond its own'frontiers, but in supplying huge quantities of war material and equipment to Britain, Russia, China and other Allied nations. As Air Roosevelt emphasised so clearly, the alternative to meeting these calls is to play into the hands of the Nazis and their partners in crime by helping them to achieve success in their leading aim : “Divide and conquer.”

It is sufficiently obvious that the collapse of any one of the Allied nations would weaken and handicap the rest and correspondingly strengthen the common enemy. ]f the process were carried far enough, the United States and the rest of the Americas ultimately would be exposed to overwhelming attack, not only in the Pacific, but from Africa across the comparatively narrow South Atlantic. Everything that is done effectively to sustain and support the war effort of the British Empire, Russia, China and other free nations makes, with its own direct military action, for the security of the United States.

If Mr Roosevelt’s perception of the complete identity of interest between all the nations fighting against Axis gangsterclom is not yet universal in the United States, it is tending rapidly to become so. As the President recognised in his speech, there are still some elements of opposition to an allout war effort, but it seems wholly improbable that they can gather head. There is no more emphatic advocate of unlimited American co-operation with the other Allied nations than Mr Wendell Willkie, who was Mr Roosevelt’s Republican o]>ponent in the last Presidential election.

The necessarily guarded disclosures President Roosevelt made with reference to the movement of American air and other forces into the South-Western Pacific will be welcomed nowhere more heartily than in the British Pacific Dominions. While they have the widest implication, it may be hoped that these disclosures are not without an immediately significant bearing on the critical struggle now opening in Java.