COUNTER TO JAPANESE “THREAT”

Southland Times, Issue 24420, 28 April 1941, Page 5

COUNTER TO JAPANESE “THREAT”

WASHINGTON, April 25

A member of the House of Representaties, Mr Warren G. Magnuson, who sits on the naval committee, in an interview proposed a unified military, naval and air command among the United States, the Philippines, Australia and the Netherlands Indies to counteract the Japanese threat resulting from the Japanese-Soviet Pact. He said that the United States Navy High Command should immediately undertake to survey the Australian, Philippine and Netherlands forces and should then determine what steps should be taken to consolidate these in the event of an emergency. “Quite probably such a survey _ has already been undertaken,” he said. That a swift Japanese thrust against Malaya will follow the next Axis move in the Eastern Mediterranean is the belief of competent observers who have arrived in Cairo from the Far East, says the Daily Telegraph’s Cairo correspondent. It is stated that Thailand resembles a Balkan country in the preinvasion stage. INTENSIVE TRAINING

Six Japanese divisions in Indo-China are intensively training in jungle warfare. Bankok’s biggest cinema is devoted to Axis propaganda and gives a daily two-hour newsreel solely of German blitzkrieg methods, including aerial shots of the bombing of Coventry. Ten thousand Japanese businessmen” have arrived in Thailand in recent weeks. All are discovering that their business takes them to the Malayan frontier and their ranks are swelling at the rate of 1000 a week. A message from Tokyo says that the Japanese newspaper Nichi Nichi Shimbun gives prominence to a dispatch from its Shanghai correspondent claiming that Britain has turned over to the United States Fleet all the duties of patrolling the British waters in the Far East to enable British naval units at Hong Kong and Singapore to rush to British home waters and the Eastern Meditteranean. The dispatch claims that the recent activities of the United States Fleet substantiate this move. It asserts that the United States’ warships which recently made goodwill visits to Australia were speeding to Singapore. Six United States submarines, it says, are already reported to be patrolling the waters around Malaya. An editorial in the newspaper describes the Japanese-Soviet Pact as an “opportunity” for the United States in the event that it really desires peace in the Pacific, because the pact aims at peace. The possibility of an American overture toward the adjustment of Japanese-American relations is suggested. The newspaper Asahi Shimbun, commenting on the ratification of the Neutrality Pact, predicted the restoration of Japanese-Soviet relations on normal “tracks,” in which case negotiations of many years’ standing for the re-demar-cation of the Manchukuo-Mongoliari border, of the Soviet-Japanese trade agreement and a long-term fishery pact are expected to “progress rapidly.”