GREATER SHARE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 January 1943, Page 3

GREATER SHARE

OF ALLIED FIGHTING RESOURCES NEEDED IN PACIFIC STRONG PROTEST BY FEDERAL PREMIER. AGAINST EXISTING STATE , OF AFFAIRS. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 10 a.m.) CANBERRA, This Day. A strong protest against the relegation by the United Nations’ strategy of the South-West Pacific to a holding war was made by the Federal Prime Minister, Mr J. Curtin, in* a broadcast to the people of Australia and the United States. The South-West Pacific, he said, was too crucial to be left to a force of caretakers, and a holding Avar policy meant that Japan was buying cheaply the time she required to exploit her new resources for an onslaught which the Unit- ■ ed Nations would find it costly to fight out. Mr Curtin outlined the part which the Australian forces had taken on sea and land and in the air, and the sacrifices that had been made by her sons and said: “I would hesitate to delineate what has been done but for the fact that it is necessary to show that we are far from being helpless and inefficient moaners in face of .the enemy. We have paid a price for our seal of nationhood. We have paid it cheerfully, as a free people in a free cause, and will go on paying it, but it is also the charter of our right to share in the common pool of Allied resources. In point of strategy, the preservation of Australia is vital to the United Nations, for the' earlier the attack against the heart of Japan the less costly and more decisive the result will be. I put it to the American people. The men of Corregidor can be avenged only if naval and air strength in this theatre are adequate to the plans of the commander. Any other conception of strategy involves the Pacific war becoming a defensive front until the United Nations have achieved victory everywhere,. except against Japan. Neither Mr Churchill nor President Roosevelt has placed a time limit on the war against Hitler. Whatever that period may be—however long it 1 may be—it will be a period during which Japan can build up to a strength that may well make her impregnable. Mr Churchill and President Roosevelt know the Australian viewpoint. It is no insular submission. Just as we agreed, from the very moment Hitler struck at world freedom in 1939, that we must contribute our share in global war, so we say that the global war involves the South-West Pacific theatre as an integral part of the total conflict. It cannot be left to an obscure afterwards. Greater air and naval strength to support the forces now fighting would have an immediate and significant impact on the Japanese plans and would enable a co-ordination of Allied fighting power, brought to bear at places and in point of time where it could well be decisive.”