WAR CLOUDS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 18763, 30 December 1930, Page 16

WAR CLOUDS.

EUROPE STILL ARMS. ALARMED OBSERVERS. On his return to the United States recently, Representative Fred. A. Britten, of Illinois, big-navy advocate, and chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs, said that Europe was increasing her armaments against “the big explosion” that is bound to come, instead of preparing to disarm (says the “New York Times”). Mr Britten said he had toured Central Europe for two months, and embodied his observations in the following statement he prepared for the Press:— “It would be an exaggeration to say that war clouds are hanging over Europe, but to predict that armaments and war preparations will be increased rather than diminished in the near future, is but a logical conclusion, when one understands the distrust the various nations over there have for each other. “I would seriously say that all Europe is much more precariously poised to-day than it was in 1912, two years before the war that shocked both hemispheres. “It certainty is much more sensitive. The French Army manoeuvres on the Italian border and their fleet demonstrations at Toulon directly overlooking Italy, recently, were nothing more or less than deliberate answers to the constant rattling of Mussolini’s sword. The spectacular French manoeuvres on the German-Lorraine border might have been good military practice, but coupled with the statement of the French War Minister at Meaux the other day, that he was sorry that the Rhine had been evacuated, it looks to me like mixing dynamite with fireworks. “When the big explosion occurs, and it is only a matter of time, there will be an immediate realignment which will again involve most of Europe, Germany and Russia will play predominant parts. The elections in Germany last Sunday presage a reconsideration of the Versailles Treaty; boundaries will be redrawn; President Wilson’s fourteen points which brought about the Armistice will be recalled, and the right of self-determination will be more accurately applied; the world will then be convinced that the last war has been fought in vain. The United States will never again actively participate in a European war, except in defence of its own honour. “Prospective war preparations are costing Europe 6,000,000d0l a day, to say nothing of the countless billions still unpaid for past wars. The Polish corridor, which cut Germany into two parts, is a thorn in the side of every German; Russia is waiting an opportunity to take back her seaports in Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and to force the return of Bessarabia, now a part of Roumania. Three million Germans in Czecho-Slovakia are ready to fight for self-determination. Yugoslavia and Italy have been at swordspoint for three years. Austria will starve to death if she is not permitted to annex with Germany. England is secretly killing the Briand scheme for a United States of Europe. “The League of Nations Commission for Disarmament has been five years or more, without ing a single thing. Europe want to disarm, it wants to These are but a few of the reao£z3 why another war in Europe is almost inevitable, and it behoves the United States to be prepared to enforce peace, in so far as we are concerned, w’hen the ill-fated hour arrives. An American navy capable of protecting American commerce in all parts of the world is the answer. Failure to provide this simple form of national insurance would not be in keeping with our much-advertised sound business judgment.” A prediction that there will be a European war by 1937 at the latest, with its starting point in Yugo-Slavia, was also made by Dr Tiber Eckhardt, vice-president of the Hungarian Frontier Readjustment League. “The “Sunday Dispatch” said that Dr Eckhardt makes this prediction in an article in which he traces the causes of friction which had their origin in the peace treaties after the World War, and draws a grave picture of existing unrest, which if unremedied, he says, are soon likely to precipitate another great war which “will cause the destruction of our, 2,000-year-old Christian civilisation.” The following are excerpts from Dr Eckhardt’s article in the “Sunday Dispatch”:—

“At the latest in 1937 a new European war is inevitable, for in the present state of dissension the slightest fire cannot be localised, and the first spark will run through a network of allies and counter-allies igniting the whole.

“On spark will be sufficient to blow up the whole barrel of gunpowder. I shah be very much mistaken if the spark is not struck in Yugo-Slavia, where the tension is highest, where already two Balkan wars have originated, and where in 1814 the revolver w'as fired in Serajevo that started the World War."

Dr Eckhardt has lectured in the United States and also before the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He was Secretary of State m Bela Kun’s Communist Government, which ousted the Karolvi regime.