Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1942. ARMED & CIVILIAN SERVICE,

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 September 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1942. ARMED & CIVILIAN SERVICE,

JT is announced by the Minister of Defence (Mr Jones) that steps have been taken with a view to ensuring that the best use is made of tradesmen and other men in the Army possessing special qualifications. An Army Trades Committee has been set up and is now investigating the present and future requirements of the Army in respect of tradesmen, the existing training arrangements, and the best methods of expanding them. It is hoped amongst other things to arrange, on the basis of surveys to be made by unit commanders, for the transfer to other units of men unsuitably employed.

Instructions had also been issued, the Minister stated, for a comprehensive survey to be made to ascertain whether men who were medically fit could be replaced by unfit men or by women. In this connection recruiting of women for employment in the Army in various capacities was proceeding with good results.

The total effect of these measures should be to bring about a more effective and less wasteful organisation and use of manpower in the Army. It is likely, however, that even better results might be obtained by correlating the survey of manpower in the Army with the broader survey of the total manpower of the Dominion which is also in hand.

A contribution of practical value to the discussion of this question is made in a bulletin issued this month by the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce. Dealing with the order of priority in which calls should be made on manpower in time of war, the bulletin suggests that the chief services included

might be ranked in order as, first, the armed forces; second, the production of war materials; third, the essential public services, including necessary administration, finance, trade, and transport; fourth, production for export, which provides the means to pay for essential imports and to maintain the forces abroad; and fifth the maintenance of civilian consumption. While such an order of priority might be generally accepted (it is added), it must also be recognised that all these services are essential and interdependent, and that the breakdown of any one of them would necessarily mean the collapse of all the others.

While rightly it gives first place to the claim of the armed forces on available national manpower, the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce bulletin with equal justice contends that an efficient and economical use of manpower should be aimed at throughout the total scale. Efficiency and economy require, it observes,

not only that no one should be out of the armed forces who could serve the national cause more effectively in them, but also that no one should be in the forces who could give better service as a civilian. And they require that all the skill, ability and aptitude available should be used to the utmost and used in the right place. It may not be possible to achieve the ideal organisation, but it should be possible to discover and to remedy the most obvious defects.

These suggestions carry, or should carry, their own recommendation and have an evidently pertinent bearing on the steps now being taken “with a view to ensuring that the best use is made of tradesmen and other men in the Army possessing special qualifications” and on the question of whether this survey might not advantageously be broadened in order to ensure the best use of manpower, under a correlated policy, in both military and civilian occupation.

This country, as it is now menaced, plainly is under the necessity of building up fighting, forces as powerful as its.total resources will permit. It is a condition of maximum fighting power, however, that an efficient balance should be struck between military and civilian service and it is emphatically a condition of the same thing that the Army should-be required to make effective and economical use of all the manpower placed at its disposal.

Several aspects of this question demand and should receive attention, not merely from an Army standpoint, but from that of national interest and the national war effort at the broadest view. Particularly where the mobilisation of large,numbers of men for the defence of the Dominion in case it should be invaded is concerned, the practicability of allowing a considerable proportion of these men to divide their time between military service and civilian occupation, education, or trade or professional training, has not yet received the attention it deserves. The constitution of an active reserve in these' conditions might do a good deal to simplify our manpower problems without involving any loss of military strength and efficiency.

At the stage now reached, the whole question of the efficient and economical use of manpower in and outside the fighting forces most decidedly should be examined comprehensively.