MERELY A MYTH

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 June 1938, Page 8

MERELY A MYTH

SUPPOSED CANAL IN SIAM. INVESTIGATORS ON THE SPOT. By elephant, motor boat, trains, automobile, and afoot, James A. Mills, correspondent of the Associated Press, travelled hundreds of miles across and along the Isthmus of Kra in search of the storied canal that Japan is supposed to be building for Siam. He declares that reports of digging such a canal are entire fabrications. There have been rumours for years in the Occident that Japan was changing the map of the Orient with a scheme to cut a canal across the narrow neck where Siam adjoins British Burma, shortening the route to Europe by many days, and vastly diminishing the strategic and commercial importance of Britain’s Oriental Gibraltar, Singapore. Travelling over the supposed site of this enterprise, Mr Mills, who has spent many years on the Asiatic Continent, touched Chumpohn on the Gulf of Siam and Taplee on the Bay of Bengal, and failed to find a single trace of the canal. He reported seeing not a single Japanese officer, not a native workman, not a stone turned, not a spadeful of earth disturbed, and not one sentry. Instead of the canal, he reported finding a forest of coconut trees full of chattering monkeys.

Peasants of Kra expressed blank amazement when the supposed canal was mentioned. The district, largely infested by tigers and wild elephants, is hilly jungle presenting insuperable difficulties to the digging of a ship channel.

American, British, and French advisers to the Siamese Government pronounced such a scheme utterly unfeasibl.e both from the strategic and commercial standpoints. They added twothirds of the isthmus consists of solid rock.

The Kra district, some 700 miles north of Singapore, and 400 miles south-west of Bangkok, has not been proclaimed a military zone, as has been reported abroad. Trains rur» through it regularly. Automobiles are allowed to circulate freely. Mr Mills took scores of photographs unhindered. In Siam he reported no basis for persistent reports that Japan is exercising dominant military, political, and commercial influence in Siam. The only Japanese expert employed by the Go* vernment is a minor agriculturist experimenting in cotton production. “The last Japanese officer engaged by the Siamese Government served 200 years ago, but today there is not a single Japanese officer in the whole of Siam,” Premier Sena told the correspondent.

Said Foreign Minister Luang Pradit Man'udharum: “Siam never will impair the friendship of the United States, Great Britain, and other powers. nor jeopardise her own independence by awarding such an enterprise as the Kra Canal to Japan.”