Skies Over the Anzacs

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 241, 4 February 1944, Page 3

Skies Over the Anzacs

HE sea-journey to Australia used to take a week. Then for a long time it filled four days. Shortly before the war, the time was cut to two days and a-half. Now the few who still cross take breakfast on one side of the Tasman and dinner on the other side. We are not yet one community, but science has brought us so close together that politics can no longer keep us apart. And that, in brief, is the meaning of the Anzac Pact. Whether we call it, with the Chicago Tribune, a "pipe-dream," an "act of statesmanship" with the London Daily Mail, or "greater strength for the new international order" with the Manchester Guardian, it began to be inevitable the day Kingsford Smith arrived in the Southern Cross, Japan of course hurried it. Hitler injected some clauses into it. But the origin of it, the meaning, the prime purpose and_ increasingly clear significance will be found in the air. Enemies who have to approach by land must come slowly. If they come by water their approach is slower still. They may still come, both ways, and conquer, but they will not often overwhelm us by surprise. The air is twenty times faster and therefore twenty times more dangerous. A squadron of bombers could leave Sydney in the morning, destroy Wellington during the lunch hour, and be grounded safely in Sydney again before the blackout. Therefore whatever is safe for Sydney is safe for Wellington, and everything that threatens Wellington threatens Sydney and Melbourne at the same time. And for those reasons and a hundred others it is natural that New Zealand and Australia should be asking now how to make the air serve their people instead of threaten them. It is natural that they should be asking such questions, and encouraging that the solution they at present propose would mean open skies all over the world. A few hours spent over sky maps will show what the alternative would be.