DELAYED BY RUSSIA

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22363, 23 June 1947, Page 3

DELAYED BY RUSSIA

JAPAN’S BIDS TO SURRENDER AMERICAN OFFICER’S CLAIM EFFORTS FOR DOMINANCE IN ORIENT (By Telegraph—Press Assn —Copyright.) (U a>m< ) WASHINGTON, June 22. The former military secretary to General MacArthur claimed that during the six months before the end of the Pacific War, Russia repeatedly received surrender bids from Japan but killed them by “extortionate demands” because it wanted to achieve a dominant position in the post-war order. Reporting on “incredible facts” in the Foreign Service magazine, Colonel Bonner Fellers declared: “Russia repeatedly rejected Japanese overtures for peace with the Allies—with Russia acting as an intermediary—as long as six months before Japan’s surrender,

“Coldly, and in her own. selfinterest, Russia was determined to obtain a dominant position in the Orient, both territorially and politically, and and to implement this determination, she planned to enter the war at the time most favourable to her. “Through official interrogation of Emperor Hirohito’s Cabinet and other highly-placed Japanese and through the Emperor’s own personal story, I learned that Russia smothered the Japanese surrender moves throughout the ■winter and late spring of 1945 by extortionate demands, simply as a fee for acting as intermediary between Japan and the United States. Russia in July again blocked an attempt. at capitulation by failing to receive Prince Konoye as an official envoy, from the Emperor, with authority to surrender and negotiate a peace.” Colonel Fellers says that Emperor Hirohito’s repeated attempts at peace show clearly that the atom bomb neither induced his decision to surrender nor did it have any effect on the ultimate outcome of the war.”