"LAUGHING UP SLEEVE"

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 16, 19 October 1943, Page 2

"LAUGHING UP SLEEVE"

JAPAN BUILDING STRENGTH FAR EASTERN AFFAIRS The Japanese arc laughing up their sleeves while the United States, concentrating on Europe and Africa, permits them to go on building their Avar industries. That is the opinion of a noted American who lias worked with the Chinese for 34 years—George A. Fitch—recently interviewed on a visit to Boston. He pleaded most urgently lor an immediate increase in shipments of munitions 1 and. planes, to China si.nf 1< lor the diversion of that small fraction of the force now turned on Hitler which would be enough to swing the tide in Far Eastern affairs (writes Pearl Straclian in the issue of the "Christian Science Monitor" of August 14.). He is* American secretary of the Chinese Y.M.C.A. and director of its "Emergency Service to Soldiers," the equivalent in a sober way of the American United Service organisation. This "Emergency Service," now about four years old. includes none of the frivolous pastimes, of the United Service Organisation, but has played a most important part in succouring the wounded, setting up centres where soldiers might meet and rest between battles,, providing free laundry and. repairing, furnishing free movies and writing letters for thousands of. illiterate men. Our Debt to China Close to the men in the Chinese armed forces, and to the peasants % and their families, as. well as to important. officials, including the Generalissimo, of whom he is a personal friend, Mr Fitch knows the situation and the attitude of the. people who have placed Americans under a tremendous debt to them. "Without what the Chinese soldier has been doing for the Allied, cause all these years," said Mr Fitch, in the course of our conversation, the Japs, would have overrun Australia and be at our own back door." There should be 500 transport planes, he said, on that lap from Assam to South China, rather than about 75, and Brigadier-General Claire L. Chennault should get the bombers he asked for. Again stressed the point that there is a definite tendency to collapse in case of another famine, if China does not get more help from overseas. Enemy's War Industries Americans, he stated, do not realise how Japan is spreading her war factories., her shipbuilding yards and refineries, so that it will become harder and harder to reach the 1 heart of her. I,n the' Philippines, in Burma, in occupied China and. other regions, he pointed out, Japan is extending her industrial programme. A real bombing of Tokyo now,, he suggested, might do much to preserve the Allied cause, in the Far East. He felt that some day the Chinese co-operatives would open up a large field for American machinery, much of it obsolete in the United States but, of use to China, «and that China, given a chance, will become "our best customer."