ARMAMENTS ENQUIRY

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 September 1934, Page 7

ARMAMENTS ENQUIRY

U.S.A. FIRM’S ACTIVITIES. [BY CABLE —PRESS ASSN. —COPYRIGHT.] WASHINGTON, September 6. The boast by an official of the Electric Boat Coy. that he had placed two of its members on the powerful House of Representatives Rules Committee, and had engineered through Congress a three million dollars company claim, caused an uproar to-day in the hearing by the Senate Committee conducting the munitions investigation. The official is Sterling J. Joyner, the Boat Coy. firm’s Washington representative. He frankly took credit, in a letter he had written to Mr. Henry R. Carse, the President of the Electric Boat Coy., in December of 1928, for the election to the Rules Committee of the House of Representatives of Representative F. W. Fort, of New Jersey, and Representative Joseph Martin, of Massachusetts, both of them Republicans. Mr. Fort is now out of Congress, but Mr. Martin is still a member o£ the House and of its Rules Committee.

In another letter, dated March 11, 1929, Joyner said: “All of our legislative efforts have borne fruit. The Cruiser Bill has passed. The Submarine Appropriations have passed, and, as I sincerely promised you on the day that we lunched together in New York, we did manage, after overcoming a number of handicaps and jumping some hurdles, to get a second Deficiency Bill through, and, in doing so. we succeeded in getting our claims through.” . , ' The details of an intensive worldwide submarine sales campaign, involving high ranking officers and also Government officials, were traced before the Senate Committee. Letters from the officials of the United Statesowned Electric Boat Coy. disclose that this concern had agreements not only with Vickers Ltd., of England, but with the leading shipbuilding concerns throughout the world. In rapid order the names of Russia, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany and Norway were spoken before the inquiring Senators as being nations into which the Electric Boat Coy’s agreements have extended. There also were documentary charges that German firms have established munitions concerns in Holland, in Sweden, in Switzerland, and in other small countries that are within easy distance of Germany for the purpose of secretly maintaining Germany’s position as a submarine power. It also was revealed that Paul Koster, a former Dutch naval captain, who is now the Director of a German munitions concern, had written to Vice-. President Lawrence Spear, of the Electric Boat Coy., asking him to use his good offices to aid him (Koster) to obtain an American sub-machine gun for use by “a certain organisation in Germany.” This occurred three months ’ before the Nazi revolt. It also was submitted that the former Assistant-Secretary for the U.S.A. Navy, Ernest Lee Johncke, while he was in the Hoover Cabinet, promised the Electric Boat Coy. a submarine contract, although its bid was higher than the Navy Department’s bid.