JAPAN’S WAR BASES

Grey River Argus, 7 April 1943, Page 5

JAPAN’S WAR BASES

GIFT OF AUSTRALIAN Billy Hughes’s Chickens HOME TO ROOST. [Aust. & N.Z. Cable Assn.] (Rec. 10.20) NEW YORK, April 5. “The Australians could not defend the Pacific islands which they demanded at the Paris conference. They could not defend their own continent when Japan approached. Mr. W. M. Hughes the then Australian Prime Minister did not see, ahead at the Paris Conference, and President Wilson too feebly defended the principle which might have saved Australia' from its terrors, saved the British Empire from its losses,- and saved the Philippines from the invader.” The “Chicago Tribune” (which formerly was an isolationist paper) makes this editorial comment in a scathing attack on Mr. W. M. Hughes, as the spokesman for Australia at the Paris Peace Conference after the Great War, andi who remains still a powerful force in Australian politics. “We look back on Mr. Hughes almost with awe,” says the “Tribune.” “It is not for his matchless achievements, but for the lasting mischief which one phjjsically-infirm ( man, with a cutting tongue, could do as the representative of a small country. Mr. Hughes at Paris insisted on the division of the Pacific Islands spoils so that Japan received all of those islands north of the Equator. If any one person put the Japanese in Malaya, in Singapore and in Burma, it was William Morris Hughes, who contemptuously dismissed President Wilson’s idea that these islands should be held in trust by.a disinterested nation. Mr. Hughes did jubilantly, and offensively what required nice" handling. It was his masterstroke of statesmanship which armed the Japanese with the bases for their attack!”