OF DOUBTFUL VALUE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 August 1939, Page 7

OF DOUBTFUL VALUE

GERMANY’S AGREEMENT WITH THE SOVIET NARROW LIMITS ON WAR SUPPLIES. THE RATIFICATION DELAYS. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. August 29. No sign of surprise at the delay by the Soviet Government in securing ratification of the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany can be elicited from official circles in London. The recent experience British negotiations have had of Russian methods is reput-, ed among well-informed journalists to have promoted a certain ironic sympathy here with anyone who expects an apparent success in Moscow to sustain for long its first brightness. Apart from such psychological factors, there is in diplomatic circles in London a tendency after longer reflection on the Soviet-Nazi agreement to discount earlier estimates of its practical advantages to the German Government in a war of aggression. The probability of Russia’s lending active military assistance was never put very high here, but some observers at first thought that supplies from the Soviet Union might go some way to repair the well-known deficiency of the Nazi war machine in certain essentials. But those who have taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with Russia’s present economy strongly maintain that she is not in a position to supply raw materials such as those of which Germany would be short for war purposes except in very limited quantities.

LACK OF TRANSPORT FOR OIL. Not the least of the impediments is the state of the Russian and German railways. Oil, for example, would have to come from Baku—exports from which are not in any case large in relation to the demands that Germany’s war needs would make. Transport over the Soviet railways to its Baltic ports would present almost insuperable difficulties. It is not disputed that the Nazi Government, whose oil supplies it is believed would be exhausted after four or five months of war, would make great efforts to supplement them from Russian as from other sources, but the net gain to be looked for from that quarter is assessed as very low indeed.

Therefore, the view is gaining ground among many in London that when the very limited material gains of the agreement are set against the confusion of mind it has caused inside Germany and the acute discomfort it has created for her anti-Comintern friends, Herr von Ribbentrop’s pilgrimage to the Kremlin, while admittedly a bold diplomatic stroke and a memorable episode in the history of political opportunism, will prove, should Herr Hitler choose to resort to war, to have altered the balance of forces very little, if at all, in favour of the Nazi aggression. It is believed that official opinion here would not dissent much, if at all. from this judgment.