START OF JAP WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 54, 1 September 1945, Page 7

START OF JAP WAR

MR. HULL'S MEMORANDUM

WASHINGTON, August 30. The State Department has released a letter from Mr. Cordell Hull (the Secretary of State at the time of Pearl Harbour), denying that his pre-war proposals to Japan constituted an ultimatum. The letter was released in reply to the implied criticism in the Army Board's report that Mr. Hull presented an ultimatum, starting the war, when the army and navy wanted to gain time. Mr. Hidl said his counter-proposals offered ttfe Japanese substantially the economic and other advantages which they sought in Asia provided that they gave up their aggressive policies. He added that he told a meeting of the War Council on November 28, 1941, that there was no possibility of an agreement and that the Japanese were likely to break out at any time in new acts of conquest. Demands continued to be made at the Capitol for open courts-martial of Rear-Admiral Husband Kimmel and Major-General Walter E. Short or a public Congressional investigation as a means of making known the unrevealed facts about the Pearl Harbour affair, says the "New York Times" correspondent in Washington. Representative Clarence Brown (Ohio) has served notice that he will ask for a joint Congressional committee to bring out the full story in open hearings. Mr. Hull's proposals were that Japan should withdraw all its forces from China, relinquish all extraterritorial rights there, and surrender its military alliance with the other Axis Powers in return for a non-aggression Pact with Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, the Netherlands, and Thailand, which the United States would endeavour to negotiate. It was also proposed that Japan should guarantee the integrity of French IndoChina. Japan was promised a new trade agreement with the United States on a most-favoured nation basis, with raw silk placed on the free list, the removal of the freezing restrictions .on Japanese funds, and the stabilisation of the exchange rate of the yen. The United States also offered to yield its extraterritorial rights in China and announced that it would recognise only the Chungking regime. The Japanese reply was that these proposals were designed to maintain American predominance in China, and, that the United States obviously intended to conspire with other countries to obstruct Japan's creation of a new order in East Asia. i