TASKS OF WAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 July 1942, Page 3

TASKS OF WAR

BRITISH NATION UNDER TEST MR HERBERT MORRISON’S SURVEY. PRELIMINARY ADVANTAGES OF GANGSTERDOM. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 9.40 a.m.) RUGBY, July 16. “Today there is a test of our capacity to wage and sustain war with a skill and efficiency overmatching that of the enemy,” said the Minister of Home Security (Mr Herbert Morrison). “In this struggle for victory there is a test of the war machine, from the organisation at the top to the arms that are put into the hands of the individual soldier in the field. To reshape the whole pattern of our society and adapt it to the purposes of war is a thing much easier to deal with in after-dinner oratory than to bring about in fact. Germany today is the product of revolution, and of war-making revolution at that. Even so, it took her six and a half years of concentrated, totalitarian effort, under the lash of dictatorship, to bring herself to the point where Hitler was ready to attack. It is little more than two years since Britain faced the full measure of her task and bent her whole energies of mind and will to the task of war. Not so soon, nor so easily, can we make up all the leeway that afflicts a peace-loving nation, too slow to realise the world’s lapse into gangsterdom. The training and equipping of a vast military machine for land operation is in part a matter of trial and error. The Germans had their trial and errors. They had them in Spain. They profited from revelations of weakness —in their tank design for instance —while we had to wait until the supreme test of total war for an opportunity to learn from corresponding experience. Victory depends just as much today, though in a different way, upon the thoughts and deeds of the people of our country—the rank and file as well as the leaders.” Mr Morrison concluded: “A righteous and courageous policy is a great inspiration to a nation in days of hazard. We have indeed been a happier people in the three years since September, 1939, than in the three years before then.”