TURKEY'S PACT WITH BRITAIN

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 244, 2 December 1940, Page 3

TURKEY'S PACT WITH BRITAIN

Italy's invasion of Greece raised the question: What would Turkey do? For weeks, early last year, von Ribbcntrop assured German army officers' that Turkey was "in the bag,/' and that there would be no Anglo-Turkish pact. Thus the signing of such a Pact of Friendship was a great shock to the German High Command.

Turkey, it was said, might have gone into the Hitler-Mussolini camp had it not been for the Italians fortifying the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean Sea. From these islands Italy is in a position to threaten everj" important centre in Turkey.

President Ismet Inonu of Turkey drove a good bargain, with Britain. He "Avas promised, it Avas understood, British crcdits of £30,000,000 to fortify the Dardanelles, 1300 warplanes, and the right to dra.AV on the Mosul oil production. France aa'us to arrange for the cession ol' a strip of Northern Syria.

The pact placed Turkey in the position, of arbiter of the. affairs of the Balkan peninsula. Able to pur a fully-equipped front line army of 1,000,,000 men. into the field at n moment's notice, and to mobilise 1.500,0'00 more later on, General Tome t Inonu believes his country to be stronger than ever before in its history. HITLER AND THE U.S.A.! The United States is feverishly re-arming against the possibility of a German invasion, should Britain be defeated. An American authority, however, sees no danger in physical invasion, but does see danger of an internal revolution fomented by Nazi influence—in a word, civil "war. " Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief,, has said: ''Nothing will lie easier than to produce a bloocly revolution in the United States. No other country has so many social and racial tensions. Wo shall be able to play upon as many strings there." Hitler himself has said: "The American people is not yet a nation in the ethnographical sense. It is a conglomerate of disparate elements, It is only the raAv materials of s nation. And the Yankees have tailed to create a nation from it."' "Looking across the Atlantic," says the American authority, "the Germans sec our millions of unemployed and our millionaires, ouv Negroes and our Ku Klux Klan;. our Jews and our anti-Semitism. They see these conditions as weapons which we will use against ourselves to destroy our unity as a nation.

. . . Hitler knows that il" National Socialism is ever to capture America, it will have to depend upon native Americans with_ un-American ideas — . . . American reactionaries (whether employers or labour leaders) who put their OAvn personal interests above the interests of the nation.". His helpers include also crooked politicians, apathetic Americans., and Americans who worship power for its own sake. These types of people oompose the real American Fifth Column.

SLEEPLESS HITLER Hitler's love of strong coffee might have caused the present war, according to Dr Ulric Williams, of Wanganui. The Fuehrer suffered from insomnia, said Dr Williams in a public address. Specialists from many countries l had tried to cure this, without success. Every day oi' his life Hitler drank 16 cups of strong black coffee,'each cup containing from three to 20 grains of caffein. The medical dose of caffein was abont three grains, but Hitler took up to 300 grains a day. "Caffein is a strong stimulant to the heart, and the dose, that Hitler takes is the cause of his insomnia," said Dr Williams. "It might even have been the cause of the present war." (Auckland message in the Sydney Sun).