Men Against Machines

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 97, 2 May 1941, Page 4

Men Against Machines

HE campaign in Greece has taken the course that everyone must have expected. Masses of German men and machines have been hurled against the Allied line without regard for anything but the objective. They have of course been hurled with great skill and reckless courage, but the success they have had has been won, not in Greece, but in the factories and parade grounds of the fatherland. The German method of fighting battles is to win them, as far as that is possible, before they begin; to assemble more guns, more men, more transport, more fighting and bombing planes, than the enemy has any chance of assembling; and then to throw all that into battle without thought of loss-a realistic method that has so far been completely successful. What then did General Smuts mean the other day when he said that the man in the end would beat the machine? Not that an unarmed man will beat an armed man, or a man partially armed beat a man whose equipment is complete. General Smuts has paid too much for his knowledge to fall back now on such follies. If there are realists in the British Commonwealth they are the South Africans of the General’s age who have fought in three wars, carried rifles from childhood, and known the bitterness of defeat by a better armed and better organised opponent. General Smuts does not suppose, and if we had his speech in full we would know that he did not say, that a rifle can beat a machine-gun, or a 300-mile-an-hour fighting ‘plane beat a fighter speeded up to 400 miles. He meant, and we may be sure he said, that other things being equal, moral force is stronger than mechanised force. In other words we can beat the Germans when we are as well equipped because then we will be better equipped. They can make what we can make mechanically (and so far have kept ahead of us). They can train men as fast as we can train men (and so far have trained far more). But the day will come when they will meet as many machines -as they themselves have, and as many men, and each of these men will have a motive and an inspiration that theirs will lack-and that no merely mechanical training can give them. They have built a machine for con- quest. We are marshalling the moral forces of freedom to overthrow that machine, and hurl it with its helmsmen to hell