"THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 720, 1 May 1953, Page 5

"THE STRUGGLE FOR EUROPE"

Sir,-I am sorry if Mr. Pilone thinks I overstated my case against Chester Wilmot. I simply found his line of talk too smugly nauseous in its assumption of the inevitability of wars, the divine right of generals and (conservative) politicians to run them according to their exclusive superior understanding, and the implied duty of all the rest of us to fight when and whom we are told without asking any awkward questions. True enough, in the history that is dished up to us, generals and politicians play the principal roles. Quite often, however, their role in history is simply to demonstrate that without the support of the uncalculating millions they have no role in history. i There are plenty of of the working out of this thesis, but the case of the lamentable Chiang Kai-Shek is perhaps the nearest in time. Four years ago his armies numbering eight millions were in command of the most fertile and populous territory on earth, based solely among their own countrymen, yet

with access to foreign arsenals and fed with foreign money. Chiang was one of the worlds "Big Four’-no less. His opponents had a numerically inferior army, no credit abroad (not-even in the Soviet Union-Stalin told Chou En-Lai to call it off as hopeless), and no foreign aid except what they took from their opponents. Yet Chiang, because he was infatuated with his own historical role and contemned the inarticulate millions, lost the support of his own people; whereas his opponents had striven for years to win and hold it. In the upshot the eight million army melted away like the Persians at Salamis. The moral is, of course, lost on most of the other generals and politicians (and their propagandists). Some of them even imagine that it is possible for their crackpot hero to be rescued from oblivion and given a second tilt at the windmills!

H. W.

YOUREN

(Napier).