AMERICA AND THE WAR

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23323, 8 May 1941, Page 9

AMERICA AND THE WAR

Co-operation With Britain DECLARATION BY SENATOR (Received May 7, 9.45 a.m.) WASHINGTON, May 6. Senator Claude Pepper, in a speech prepared .for delivery in the Senate, demanded that the United States should “get tough” and occupy, with Britain, such strategic points as Dakar, the Azores, the Canary and Cape Verde Islands, Greenland, Iceland, and Singapore, also points in the Far East to “shut up the Japanese navy in its own lair.” “A few American pilots in a few first-class American bombing aeroplanes can make a shambles of Tokyo,” he declared. Senator Pepper advocated that the United States should abandon all neutrality ffills and send its ships wherever international law permits. If Axis submarines attempt interference, the United States should “blow them from the water as fast as we can.” Mr Roosevelt summoned a special meeting of his “War Cabinet," consisting of the Secretary of State (Mr Cordell Hull), the Secretary of the Navy(Colonel Frank Knox), the Secretary of the Army (Mr H. L. Stimson), and the Secretary of the Treasury (Mr Henry Morgenthau) to act on his request for greatly increased bomber production to give the democracies command of the air. The meeting was also attended by the Chief of Staff (General George Marshall), the Chief of Naval Operations (Admiral H. R. Stark), and the Chief of the United States Army Air Corps (Major-General Henry H. Arnold), who has just returned from London with a report of Britain’s aerial needs, and Mr Harry Hopkins, who was Mr Roosevelt’s personal representative in Britain. Informed circles in Washington stated that the rapid reinforcement of the Royal Air Force for the “all out” bombing of Germany is the objective of Mr Roosevelt’s emergency order to speed up the production of long-range bombers, the eventual goal Of which is reported to be 500 a month. An effort by isolationists in the United States House of Representatives