MENAGE OF ARROGANCE!

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 7, 23 September 1942, Page 4

MENAGE OF ARROGANCE!

SLOWLY public opinion in America has veered round to the realisation that the symbol of Naziism is not the greatest threat with which that vast democracy has to contend

but rather it is the sign of the Rising* Sun flaring menacingly across the Pacific and penetrating north to the Alentians, south to the Solomons and west through the yellow body of China to the borderland of Siberia. The nation of Japan to-day has flung down the ga.untlet in a manner which can only spell either her ascent to the dizzy heights of dominating a thousand million Orientals and Indians or else of sealing- her own doom. The words of Mr Joseph Grew, erstwhile American Ambassador, must have a sobering effect upon the great bulk of the American people. "Those who have never lived in Japan can have no conception of the over-weaning confidence of the Japanese Army and Navy and their over-weaning ambition and determination to conquer and subjugate portions of the: Occident, just as they have already temporarily possessed themselves of large sections of the Orient." These words alone should serve to bring to Americans and to ourselves, situated as we are in the direct line of the southerly advance of the armies of the Mikado, the fullest realisation of the vast task which lies ahead. Nor must we run the danger of confusing the scattered skirmishing in the Pacific Islands, with the real nature of the war with Japan. Once again we have been reassured that on land at any rate the Jap soldier is a desperate courageous foe, neither asking or giving quarter. His motto is 'fight to the d,eath' and his belief is that such a death will bring him immediately the unbounded joys of Paradise unending. Thus he' has confounded the fighting tactics of all the accepted military text-books; thus he has won through on a thousand fronts of tangled jungle and often plain, and thus too he has regularly indulged in an orgy of terrorism and beastiality which he has been officially taught to believe is his just and legal reward. The great clash of the yellow and white has yet to be and reviewing all the facts and taking careful stock of the outpost engagements to date we. may well seek the kindness of fate and pray that the clash occurs at sea, over which,, and we may well feel thankful again, Japan must launch all her attacks before she can engage in land; fighting. Thus the force and soundness of America's vast naval programme which is now so well under way and thus too the antithesis of an island empire seeking to attack as is Japan, and an island empire on the defence as was Great Britain eighteen, months ago.