Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, APRIL 19, 1943. AN ALLEGED MESS.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 April 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, APRIL 19, 1943. AN ALLEGED MESS.

0 PEELING seems to be running strangely high in the United States on the question of the allocation of additional forces, particularly air forces, to the South-West Pacific. Controversy on this subject evidently has derived a new impetus from a statement by the American Secretary for War (Mr Stimson) in the course of which he said: —• We will keep the American and Australian airmen in the South-West Pacific supplied not only with sufficient planes to replace their losses, but to build up their resources to counter the increasing Japanese air strength. This surely may be regarded as a satisfactory assurance. It might have been expected that it would have been welcomed by all concerned, as it was by the Australian Minister of External Affairs (Dr. Evatt) who has been one of the most insistent advocates of the allocation of additional air strength to the South-West Pacific. Mr Stimson appears to have made a prompt and reasonable response to the military commanders and others who have of late emphasised the necessity of providing additional air forces to deal with those that are being built up by the Japanese in the great island arc north of Australia.

In the United States, however, the questions involved are still being debated heatedly from opposed standpoints. A Washington correspondent was reported at the end of last ■week to be quoting official sources in stating that the planes promised by the Secretary for War are those allocated to the South-West Pacific at the recent Washington conference “and do not constitute any additional allocation.” On the other hand the New York “Daily Mirror,” in an editorial in which it asserted that: “The whole mess in the Pacific smells of muddling and bad management, with a whiff of politics thrown in,” contended also that: “Mr Stimson’s promise that General MacArthur will be given more supplies, particularly of aircraft, is itself an admission that he had not been properly supplied.”

A good deal of this wrangling apparently results from a needless assertion of extreme views. The reasonable attitude taken by Dr Evatt and others, including presumably the military commanders whose statements have lately been made public, is that without detriment to the Allied strategy of concentrating in the first instance against Nazi Germany, it is both possible and very necessary to maintain such air and other forces in the Pacific as will be able to checkmate Japan and wear down her strength in the period that must elapse before she can be attacked in full power.

There is no obvious justification for talking about a mess in the Pacific. On the contrary much damage and loss have been inflicted on the enemy by a splendidly daring and enterprising use of limited forces. But account has to be taken of the fact that the Japanese have an immense body of strength in hand and in reserve and certainly continue to constitute a very definite menace in the South-West Pacific and in other areas. At the same time there appear to be no valid grounds for suggesting that the air reinforcements needed to make the position in the Pacific reasonably secure and to permit the continuance of a purposeful campaign of attrition are likely to involve any appreciable weakening of the Allied forces in Europe. The number of bombers lost in the l successful and destructive attack on the Skoda armament works, reported today, would have constituted a force half as strong again as that which won the Battle of the Bismarck Sea and annihilated a Japanese convoy of 22 ships.

It must be hoped that Mr Stimson’s statement means precisely what its straightforward and explicit terms imply. It offers an assurance that essential needs in the Pacific will be met —needs which could not be neglected without serious detriment to the Allied cause from the widest standpoint of world war strategy. The matter might very well be left at that for the time being.