HOT ATTACK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 October 1939, Page 7

HOT ATTACK

MADE ON AMERICAN MINISTER ACCUSED OF INFLAMING WAR SENTIMENT. SENATOR’S BITTER TIRADE. By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright. (Received This Day, 9.20 a.m.) WASHINGTON, October 11. Senator Clark, opening the seventh day of the Neutrality debate, accused the AssistantSecretary for War, Mr Johnson. of attempting to inflame the people regarding Ihe safely of their own - shores, lie alleged that President Roosevelt was exercising emergency ■ ]towers which actually were vested in him for use in time of war or imminent danger of war. Commenting on Mr Johnson’s speech on Tuesday, Senator Clark declared: “In my judgment no more idiotic, more moronic or more unpatriotic remark was ever made by a man in a high public position. It is the same Mr Johnson who for years has been preaching the inevitability of war who recently, minus the authority of law, created a War Resources Board and stacked the personnel with Morgan and Dupont controlled members.” Senator Clark said it was an open secret that many supporters of the embargo repeal believed the United States should take sides in the war and he expressed the opinion that it would be far cheaper to put a naval or air fleet in the Atlantic in order to prevent an attack. A cablegram yesterday reported Mr Johnson as stating that Germany’s swift conquest ’of Poland emphasised the necessity for immediately increasing the man-power and the equipment of the United States Army. He expressed the view that the present militia of 400,000 regulars might find itself, like Poland, inadequate in an emergency, lacking combat cars, tanks, machine-guns, gas masks and fire-con-trol instruments. He added: “Had our mechanised units met the German mechanised forces we would have been outnumbered in combat cars, light and medium tanks and against them we could have raised but a few antitank guns. Our mechanisation programme is barely started and must be hastened.”