Stark Facts Point To A Long
pp. 5-6 · Read in the full issue
War
WE know that there is no hope of a peace, worthy of the name, unless we gain victory pver the Axis and completely destrov the Huns of Berlin and Tokio. But, so fiercely do we long for an end of this filth and horror, for the return of our boys and the resumption of a normal way of life, that we permit our hopes to colour our calculations, and pin our faith upon very foolish prognostications concerning the end of this war- Because we now have done with defensive war—three seemingly endless years of defeats and disasters— and because we now are delivering such mighty blows that our arrogant and cocksure enemy is himself on the defensive, some silly people are predicting “the end of the war in Europe in 1943, and the smashing of Japan in 1844.” Such prophets should be stuck in pillories on the highways, so as to be seen as a public menace, and a warning to the people against wishful thinking.
Let us soberly weigh the known and proven facts. They are sufficient to show how cruel it is to delude the people with rosy summaries of situations which ignore all the ugly angles.
Beyond doubt, Hitler’s failures have been colossal. He failed to subdue Bntain. He failed to crush Russia in 1941, and failed disastrously in 1942 in his plan to break through the
Caucasus into the Middle East. His Africa Korps failed to reach the Nile Delta, and has been overwhelmingly defeated. He was completely out witted by the Allies when they occupied French North-west Africa, His Italian partner, deprived of all African possessions, is sore and suf fering and near unto moral collapse, His Japanese partner, after spec tacular successes, has not had a real victory for six months, but has, in stead, received a severe thrashing at the hands of American naval and air forces, wherever they have met.
So it is not surprising that our wishful thinkers should fix their eager attention upon that intangible but supremely important thing called “enemy morale.” Now that the Ger man people realise that Hitler has led them into a hopeless morass (they argue), all the fight will go out of the Axis. And that is just where the wishful thinkers go far astray. They will not see the real picture from the Axis viewpoint.
TTITLER’S dream of world-conquest *1 has faded. But, if the Nazis are prepared to organise and fight a de fensive war, what a headache they can set the United Nations! Except for the poorer half of Russia, they literally control the whole of Con tinental Europe. The only countries which are nominally free—Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland—
carry out the economic orders of their terrible neighbour. All the others are slaves of the Nazis—their hundreds of millions of workers are driven to production in Nazi-controlled factories or on Nazi-controlled farms, their products and raw materials are seized ruthlessly by the Germans, and allotted according to the wishes of the “super-men” in Berlin.
It is true that Europe now is ringed around by the forces of the United Nations—Russians in the east, British and Americans and Fighting French in the west and south. But, within that ring, Germany has at her command the world’s richest continent; there she has—or can organise the produc tion of—everything needed to feed and equip her enormous armed forces.
She can construct successive lines of fortifications, and she will have the advantage of fighting upon interior lines of communication. Europe can be blockaded, up to a point; but the blockade is being defeated, to an in creasing degree, by air transportation.
If the morale of the German people holds, the European war may go on for years.
Recent events on the Russian front provide a good pointer. In November, embarrassed by the Russian winter and by the Allies’ unexpected move in French North Africa, and the Eighth Army’s victory over Rom mel, Hitler eased his pressure against the Russians. Immediately, the Russians struck, the German front lines were thrown into great con fusion, and every newspaper in the world announced colossal defeats of the enemy on the Russian front and
the imminent collapse of Germany.
But what really has happened? The Germans took fearful punishment from the Russians; but they still hold their Leningrad-Rjev-Stalingrad line, and they still are strongly resisting the Russians’ most furious onslaughts.
The enemy has been defeated in that his great strategic plan has been foiled; but he has not collapsed, and appears to be completely ready to fight a defensive war.
FOR three years, the German people were confident that, led by their screeching Hitler, they were becom ing masters of the world. And was it any wonder? Country after country fell to their irresistible armies; end less masses of booty, and countless prisoners (2,000,000 French, 250,000 Belgians, 400,000 Dutch, 60,000 British, 300,000 Russians, plus unknown num bers of Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Greeks, Jugo-Slavs), poured cease lessly into Germany. And just when the flow was dwindling, Japan leaped to Germany’s side, and, in the name of the Axis, seized vast territories and enormous booty.
How, then, can we now expect a weakening of mprale? German masses will not be easily turned, from con templation of themselves as world conquerors, to savour the bitter flavours of defeat. These are not the starving, harassed, blockaded Ger mans of 1918. These people are being supplied and fed by the enslaved and starving millions of the conquered countries. So long as they are organ ised and fed, they will fight on in defence of their frontiers—especially when, in every German consciousness, there is a fear that countless millions of wretched Russians and Poles, Czechs and Serbs and Greeks, French and Norwegians, now are merely existing in the belief that some day they will be able to wreak bitter vengeance upon the bodies of their Teutonic torturers.
PRESSURE upon Germany’s de fences in western and southern Europe will come primarily from British and American armies, sup ported by American production. Those forces must be supported by water transportation; and Germany will strike against Allied shipping in the Atlantic with every U-boat she can bring into commission.
This, probably, is the gravest prob lem now confronting the United Nations: How to counter the U-boat?
And—as Mr. Churchill himself ack nowledges—it is far from being solved.
WE see the same grim prospect as we turn to the war in the Pacific. Here, again, is an enemy who has had enormous and intoxicating initial successes; who squats arro gantly atop of vast new territories and tens of millions of conquered peoples; who recognises probably that he is not capable of further expan sion, but who’ is completely ready to fight on indefinitely with every weapon and resource at his command.
This Jap enemy, in one way, is more formidable than the German; because, while the German at least possesses the European’s sensitive ness to reason, and will react reason ably to a conviction of defeat, the Japanese, like a trapped and mad dened animal, will go on fighting hopelessly until he is stopped by extermination.
BECAUSE of the ill-balanced pro minence given in Australia to the operations in New Guinea and the Solomons, the people of the South Pacific have got the Pacific war situation somewhat out of focus.
Many imagine that these operations represent an important part of the global war, and that Japan is being beaten.
In actual fact, the Pacific war situation has been almost static since the Japanese completed the occu pation of Indonesia some eight months ago. There have been sporadic fighting in China, and some en counters in the South Pacific Islands, involving the use of a couple of divisions, and considerable air and naval forces. Otherwise, Japan has not been fighting. Her enormous armed forces—especially military and naval forces—have been merely stand ing by, busily preparing themselves for the life-and-death struggle with the Anglo-American powers which they now know to be inevitable.
Meanwhile, through the rapid deve lopment of the territories she has captured since December 7—“ the day that will go down in infamy”—Japan has received an enormous accession to her economic strength, and every day is becoming more capable of re sistance and counter-attack.
Except that they protect Australia, and so permit of its preparation as a vital base for future attack, Allied thrusts against the Japanese in the New Guinea and Solomons areas have little military value. Even if we kill every Jap there, and re-occupy every New Guinea and Solomons island, we shall not have altered perceptibly the Pacific military situation.
But those operations have great moral value. They have proved that the Anglo-Americans, on the land, in the air and on the sea are better men in every respect than “the inspired and fanatical Sons of Heaven.” They indicate to us the shape of the war that is to come. Given the machines, we can out-fight, overwhelm and exterminate the Jap.
The Japanese now are dug into ten thousand islands, every man pre pared to die there, so long as he can inflict maximum casualties and dam age upon the Allied forces. That, in a word, is Japan’s strategy. She will fight to the finish, if only she thereby can be left in possession of the rich territories she grabbed.
WHAT is the answer? It certainly is not to be found in “peri winkle tactics”—rooting every fight ing Jap, on his thousands of fortified islands and rocks, out of his fox-hole with a bayonet. It almost certainly
does lie, in the Pacific as in Europe, in a growing naval offensive, and in the building-up of overwhelming air power.
The Jap soldier is a tough indivi dual fighter, and is at his best in the tangled tropical jungles. But the Jap bluejacket, called upon to fight with machines, is not so good—he has been well beaten every time he has met the American navy—while the Japanese airmen are definitely in ferior. The Allies can not only out fight, but also can out-build the Japanese on the sea and in the air; and Japan will be beaten, not by hammering her robot-like soldiers in the South Pacific jungles, but by crippling her navy, destroying her merchant ships, and bombing her in dustrial cities.
These South Pacific battles, while relatively unimportant, tactically, are vital to the Allies’ ultimate strategic plan, because they allow Australia to become a vast military base. Japan ultimately will be crippled by an air offensive, based on China. Her power in her new empire—which she now is so avidly hugging to herself—will be broken by the destruction of her merchant shipping. And then forces based on Australia will be able to move northwards through the islands of Indonesia, mopping up. One deals with an octopus by first destroying its head; then one may more easily deal with its arms.
THIS war cannot end quickly. The psychology of defeat has not yet entered the German soul. The Ger man will not begin to envisage his inevitable end until he finds himself being beaten in defence, and battered ceaselessly by Allied air power; and he is only now beginning to go upon the defensive.
Japan, . a first-class military and naval power, has not yet really com menced to fight. Her military opera tions against vastly inferior British and American forces in Indonesia, early in 1942, were “push-overs”; and only a small section of her navy has been engaged. She confidently be lieves herself capable of fighting off any forces which the Allies can bring against her —at least, so long as the Allies are engaged also in Europe.
Keep the war in focus. In certain circumstances, it could end within a couple of years. But, at the moment, none of those circumstances exist; and there is not one sign anywhere of an enemy collapse.
Mr. W. L. Parham, of Tailevu, Fiji, died suddenly on November 13. He was the son of the late Mr. Charles Parham, of Raku Raku Bay, and Mrs. Parham, of Suva, and was born in South Africa in 1900. He joined the Department of Agriculture in 1900. He had marked literary ability, and many of his articles were published in overseas papers and he was greatly interested in the Fijians.
He is survived by a wife and two child ren. His mother (who resides with her two daughters in Suva) is a well-known botanist, and has compiled much valu able material about the flora of Fiji.