DANGERS OF DELAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 December 1943, Page 4

DANGERS OF DELAY

IN ATTACKING JAPAN EMPHASISED BY FEDERAL PRIME MINISTER. IMMENSE POTENTIAL ENEMY RESOURCES. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 12.35 p.m.) SYDNEY, This Day. The folly of supposing that Japan will be readily crushed after the defeat of Nazi Germany has been again stressed by the Federal Prime Minister (Mr Curtin). His statement, made on the opening of the third year of war in the Pacific, also supported recent hints - from official quarters that more men and equipment could be well employed in the South-West Pacific area.

As the third year of battle is unfolded, there need be no misgivings, but there should be no shortcomings, Mr Curtin said. The Allied forces in the South-West Pacific had, with limited resources, taken every Japanese military position they had attacked. Given a heightened scale of striking power, the same forces could break into Japan’s conquered empire before it could be fully exploited. They could then strike at Japan’s „inner empire and at Japan itself. Japan had rich resources and a vast pool of slave labour in the 300 million people in her conquered empire. One estimate had placed five years as the time which, if it were permitted to Japan to harness her slave labour and rich resources to war purposes, would make Japan the world’s most powerful military nation. The Japanese fighting man was disciplined beyond anything known in the Western armies and the Japanese army had no equivalent order to “retreat” in English. It was in these two great factors that the democracies faced failure to overcome Japan —if the Japanese were allowed time to employ them.. AUSTRALIA’S WAR EFFORT. Mr Curtin gave some details of Australia’s war effort, which, he said, compared with that of any of the United Nations. Australia had 1,181,000 men, practically half the working male population, in direct war work. Enlistments in the fighting forces were 858,600, almost two in every three men between 18 and 40. Volunteers to fight anywhere numbered 607,000. Australia' was spending practically half her national income on the war. . Direct taxation was virtually at its limit. The loan programme had raised £425,000,000 since Japan struck at Pearl Harbour. Commenting on Mr Curtin’s statement, the “Sydney Morning Herald” editorially points out that the Japanese never banked on a short wax. Rather they reckoned that, having . acquired rich resources and consolidated their outer defences, they could fight on until their adversaries became weary of the struggle. “In this they are mistaken,” says the paper, which commends Mr Curtin’s emphasis on the formidable nature of the struggle ahead, and on the necessity for denying the Japanese time in which to exploit their early conquests.