EVENT OF INVASION.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 28, 13 November 1939, Page 5

EVENT OF INVASION.

POSSIBLE JAPANESE ACTION. THREAT TO THE PACIFIC. NEW YORK, November 12. Major George Fielding Eliot, in a copyright message in the “New York Herald Tribune,” draws attention to the threat to British and United States interests in the Pacific inherent in the involvement of the Netherlands in the European war, which Japan might regard as a cue to seize the Netherlands East Indies, thus neutralising Singapore, surrounding the Philippines, and threatening Australia and New Zealand. The attitude of the United States in this connection is difficult to lorecast. She might be confronted in the future with the question of whether she proposed to defend Australia and New Zealand from Asiatic penetration, a task easier now than with the Japanese established in New Guinea. Major Eliot adds that clearly the results of a German attack on Holland will not be confined to tho > strategic situation on the Western Front. Certainly, the United States would be most concerned regarding the possessions of the Netherlands in th<j West Indies and Guiana, and would assuredly resist a German claim to them. She cannot afford to permit to the Germans air and submarinp bases in the Caribbean Sea area and South America.