STARTING POINT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 December 1942, Page 4

STARTING POINT

OF PRESENT WORLD WAR EVENTS AFTER PREVIOUS CONFLICT. DIPPLOMATIC EVIDENCE. (By Telegraph—(Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 12.20 p.m.) WASHINGTON, December 20. The State Department has publishtwp volumes of diplomatic documents, covering the period from the armistice in 1918 until the beginning of the Parjs Peace Conference in 1919, showing that the period which had been hailed as the beginning of a new and better epoch was in reality the starting point for the present war. Typical examples are that an American delegate to the peace conference, General Bliss, told Mr R. Lansing .(U.S.A. Secretary of State) on January 9. 1919: “The claims of the Italian Government, which requests Ethiopia and Albania, are based solely on an assumed revival of war in the not distant future.” Again the United States Minister to China, Mr Paul Reins.ch, reported to the State Department on January 6, 1919: “The methods applied by Japanese masters can lead only to evil and destruction and the Japanese will not be stopped by considerations of fairness and iustice.” At the same time the American Ambassador to Tokio, Mr Roland Morris, reported: “Japanese leaders want supremacy in the Far East. Therefore, they do not favour limitation of armaments.”

The Assistant Secretary of State, Mr Brekenbridge Long, in a '.confidential memorandum on December 14, 1918, said Japan’s mandates in the Pacific will be “a potential menace to the United States and the Philippines.” Prefacing the publication of documents the State Department expresses the hope that they will enable us to profit from history and avoid pitfalls similar fo those into which we blundered after the last war.