Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1942. GERMANY AND JAPAN.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 November 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1942. GERMANY AND JAPAN.

o ACCORDING to a New York correspondent quoted in one of yesterday’s cablegrams, Hitler is “prodding the unwilling Japanese to attack Siberia or India in the hope of improving his position.” If this is true it is significant only as an additional indication of the straits to which the Nazi dictatorship is reduced. Nothing is established more clearly than that the Japanese are in the Avar for themselves and that if they evei attack Siberia or India it will be because they see prospects of advantage to themselves in doing so. Any attempt by Hitler at this stage to induce Japan to strike at Russia is the more likely to tall flat since there are excellent grounds for believing that Japan considers she'waslet down by Germany in the matter of establishing favourable conditions for a combined and concerted attack on Russia. On this subject, the former Shanghai correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor,” Mr Frederick B. Upper, wrote in an article published in that paper recently:— Some American observers believe Japan launched its attacks against the United States and Britain on the basis of German assertions that Moscow was about to fall and m the concurrent belief that' this would mean Anglo-American preoccupation with the Atlantic and Europe, allowing the Pacific to go by default, ft is true that the German Ambassador, General Eugen Ott, was active in Tokio just prior to the war’s outbreak attempting to persuade the Japanese to that belief. It is equally true that within a few days of Pearl Harbour the Germans’ drive on Moscow was halted. The Nazi dictatorship and the Japanese military autocracy have long combined in plotting against Russia. For instance in his book “Mission to Moscow,” Mr Joseph E. Davies, former United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, points out that testimony at the Bukharin mass treason trial in Moscow in the early part of 1938 disclosed that: — The principal defendants had entered into a conspiracy among themselves, and into an agreement with Germany and Japan to aid those governments in a military attack upon the Soviet Union. They agreed to and actually did co-operate in plans to _ assassinate Stalin and Molotov, and to project a military uprising against the Kremlin which was to be led by General Tukhatcheysky, the second in command of the Red Army. . . . They agreed among themselves and with the German and Japanese governments to cooperate with them in war upon the Soviet Government. ana to form an independent smaller Soviet State which would yield up large sections of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine and White Russia in the west to Germany and the Maritime provinces in the east to Japan. It is perhaps on the strength of the full understanding he had thus reached with the Japanese autocracy on schemes of murder, aggression and spoliation that Hitler is now attempting to prod the Japanese to action that would be helpful from his standpoint. As has been said, however, the Japanese, like the Germans, are concerned only with advantage to themselves. None are more eager than the Japanese militarists, it may be supposed, to carry predatory aggression to its practicable limits, but reasons appear for believing that they are already more than fully occupied in the Pacific. In any event, nothing is less to be expected than that they will, make any move with the object primarily of assisting or relieving the Axis in Europe. The German-Japanese alliance has been described too politely as a marriage of convenience. It might more accurately be called an unstable union of murderers and thieves, with each party looking solely to its own material advantage.