Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1941. JAPAN AS AGGRESSOR.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 August 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1941. JAPAN AS AGGRESSOR.

PARTLY, no doubt, under the insistence of her Axis partners in Europe, but to a considerable extent a.lso in a direct development of the course she has pursued, deliberately and independently over a period of a good many years, Japan continues, in spite of some unconvincing disclaimers, to shape a policy in Eastern and .South-Eastern Asia which obviously threatens to start a blaze of war in the Pacific. .Li themselves, the Japanese threat to Singapore and the Netherlands East Indies by way of Thailand, and the simultaneous threat to Siberia, which appears in the massing °l forces within comparatively easy striking distance, 01. Vladivostok and in other ways, .of course, are very serious. Account has to be taken, too, of the likelihood of widespread Japanese attacks upon the seaborne commerce of tin l English-speaking and other nations in. the Pacific should the existing tension culminate in war. On visible facts, however, it may not unreasonably be considered that any threat Japan is able to raise to other nations is outweighed by the dangers she will herself incur it hostilities break out in the Pacific. Certainly the forces she is wantonly challenging are in the aggregate exceedingly formidable and she is at the same time in some respects extremely vulnerable to attack. It should, perhaps. be assumed that her economic weakness would be offset for a time by her accumulation ol: reserves of war and other materials. In a number of vital respects, however, her position and outlook as an aggressor could hardly be less promising than they are. There is now every indication that she would have to reckon, with the combined naval strength of the British Empire and the United States and with air forces to which her own are declared to be in all respects markedly inferior. No secret has been made of the fact that the defences of Singapore and' Malaya are of tremendous strength. These are very far from being the only factors with which Japan will have to cope if she is mad enough to plunge into war. It is now reported that Russia has forces totalling a million men on her Asiatic borders adjoining China and Manehukuo. Whatever figures of this kind may be worth, it, is a matter not of conjecture but of fact that Russia has developed her armies in Siberia and her defences generally in that territory to a very high point of efficiency. This she has done not least notably in the elaboration, within Siberia, of the industrial and other bases and supply routes which count for'so much in modern war. A remarkable and very valuable addition to these supply routes is the successful establishment of a navigable, permanent Arctic sea-route from Europe to Asia, maintained by four main patrols of ice-breakers at stages on the northern coasts of Europe and Asia. With no prospect of relief in her exhausting war in China, Japan, in entering on extended aggression, would be opposed very powerfully at sea and not less so in whatever campaigns she opened in Northern and South-Eastern Asia. Even this does not complete the picture. On her Siberian seaboard. Russia is possessed of airfields from which bombers could easily reach many of the principal naval and air bases, industrial centres and other targets in Japan. It has been said that the ferrying of planes from the United States to these Russian bases would be an undertaking little more arduous than the present ferrying of similar planes across, the Atlantic.

In the circumstances it may be expected and certainly must be hoped that serious heed will be given in Tokio to the bluntwarning' the Japanese Ambassador in 'Washington (Admiral Nomura) is said to have forwarded to his Government —a warning that further expansion in the South Pacific may result in war with the United States.