BRITISH SHIPS SEIZE U.S. MAIL. A controversy has been smouldering between Britain and the United States over an issue which, once upon a time, led to war between the two nations. The British Navy has been in recent days seizing and inspecting mail pouches from U.S. ships headed to Europe, claiming that pro-Nazi interests in America are smuggling contraband goods into Germany by letter and parcel. A Thursday New York Herald Tribune story by Frank R. Kelley quotes officials of the British Ministry of Economic Warfare as claiming the searches have uncovered “a traffic so large that it fully justified the continued interference” in U.S. mail delivery. Britain also alleges there is “a highly organized system for collecting money from Americans of Nazi sympathies” and wirelessing it to Holland, where it is converted into food parcels for shipment to the Reich. Officials also put on display seized food parcels shipped directly from America with false customs declarations, such as “designs of stained glass.”
The State Department has formally protested the seizures, and Secretary Hull has insisted the British “bring about an immediate correction of this situation.” Meanwhile, Major George Fielding Eliot suggests in a Herald Tribune analysis that the seizures are purely due to British arrogance -- “The cold hard fact is that Great Britain has ceased to be the world-dominant naval power, though she continues to behave as if she were.” He recommends, I think appropriately so, that the Roosevelt administration provide a U.S. naval escort to mail-carrying ships. That ought to immediately deter the British from this short-sighted foolhardiness.
At least some Britons are taking a more thoughtful attitude toward the matter. Saturday’s Chicago Tribune quotes an editorial from London’s Daily Express, noting that however much canned coffee, prunes, and chocolate are finding their way to Germany through the U.S. mail, it doesn’t amount to anything more than a pitifully minor leakage in the blockade. “Nothing we are likely to find in letters or packages is worth a quarrel with America,” the editors say, adding that if the mail seizure “risks disturbing good relations, then we should stop the search.” Amen to that.
FINNISH VICTORY AT LAKE LADOGA. Big war story of the last two days has been the Red Army’s desperate fight in the icy wilderness north of Finland’s Lake Ladoga, in which two divisions are said to be trapped by Finnish forces and two other divisions are battering in vain at Finnish lines near the towns of Kollaanjoki and Tolvajaervi. According to a dispatch by K.J. Eskelund in Saturday’s New York Times, more than 1,000 Red soldiers fell in Thursday’s operations north of the lake, where fresh Russian detachments tried to cross the ice to relieve encircled troops at Kitalae. They were repulsed by a withering Finnish artillery fire. Farther south, savage new Russian attacks on the Mannerheim Line were also beaten back.
The Russian units which aren’t encircled are still significantly handicapped, by having to deal with the coldest winter weather in the area in sixty years, and by non-stop Finnish guerilla attacks on their supply lines. And Wade Werner, Associated Press correspondent, reports Saturday that as the Lake Ladoga battle unfolds, Finnish strategists feel they are “on the verge of another coup such as the one which brought destruction to two Russian divisions on the Salla front.” The United Press now says that overall, Russian casualties in the two-month Finnish campaign have topped 100,000.
What are the Russian people hearing about all this? Well, the official Soviet communique describing Thursday’s operations said simply, “Nothing of importance took place at the front.”
FULL-SCALE ALLIED HELP FOR FINLAND? The New York Herald Tribune reports one bit of good news on Friday -- the Allies might be willing to take on Russian aggression, after all. “Great Britain and France, it was disclosed [Thursday night], are dispatching a joint military mission to Finland to determine in detail what are the full military requirements of the Finns for defeating the Soviet invasion. It can now be said with assurance that the Allies are wholly prepared to meet these requirements in material and men -- though the men in question will be designated as ‘volunteers.’”
EMBARGO ON JAPAN? A number of articles ran in the papers Friday marking the official expiration of the twenty-eight-year-old commercial treaty between American and Japan. Most interesting was a story in the Washington Post by William V. Nessly describing moves in the U.S. Senate to promote an embargo on at least some Japanese trade. The Roosevelt administration has been reportedly interested in using the expiration of the treaty as a lever to prod Japan into giving up her aggression in China and agreeing to respect the U.S. and Europe's treaty rights in the Far East. No interruption in trade is planned at this time, but expiration of the treaty gives the U.S. government the ability to halt commerce without warning.
But according to the Post, a number of Senators are ready to embargo trade with Japan as soon as possible, and their ranks include isolationists as well as supporters of the President’s policy. Senator Schwellenbach, Democrat of Washington, is quoted as say the treaty’s lapse “gives us an opportunity to comply with the wishes of 75 per cent of our people by getting out of the Japanese-Chinese war.” Senator George, Democrat of Georgia, predicts that the Congress will vote to cut off sale of at least all war-related materials And Senator Pittman, chairman of the Commerce Committee, has suggested that Congress could start by boycotting war materials, and then could extend the embargo if Tokyo took reprisals against U.S. interests.
U.S. goods and purchases have been a vital part of Japan’s economic machine, says a new Commerce Department study cited by the Post -- “In 1938 and the first ten months of 1939, the United States supplied nearly 44 per cent of Japan’s imports from foreign currency countries, and bought from 27.9 to 33.7 per cent of her exports... ‘No other foreign currency country,’ [the report] said, ‘contributes anything like the share of the United States in Japan’s foreign trade.’” Thus, an embargo could be a powerful weapon to influence Japanese behavior.
THE MYTHICAL NAZI INVASION OF SWEDEN. It was only a one-paragraph Associated Press bulletin, but it prompted a screaming front-page banner headline in Friday’s Chicago Tribune -- “TO AMERICANS: FLEE SWEDEN.” The A.P. said the U.S. minister to Sweden had advised Americans to quit the country immediately because of “German troop concentrations” in north Germany facing the Swedes from across the Baltic Sea. The story caused no little consternation in Sweden, and an abrupt drop in her stock market.
But there was nothing to the tale, and a story in Saturday’s New York Times by George Axelsson set forth what actually happened. It seems the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter obtained the news that the U.S. minister had privately sent a circular to some Americans “urging the departure of those not having compelling reasons for remaining.” He did so of his own initiative and without consulting the State Department, which disavowed the advisory. The Times adds that the phantom German troop concentrations were “gratuitously added” to the story by the Dagens Nyheter. And for the sake of a sensational newspaper story, a nation was sent into panic, if only briefly.
MINISTERS OF WAR? The Chicago Tribune, in an editorial lauding Holland’s rebuff of Winston Churchill’s plea for neutrals to join the Allies, seemed to imply that certain unnamed churchmen in the U.S. are un-American, and should just simply get out of the country. This is apparently because they commit the sin of not being isolationist. The Tribune’s remarkable, curious, and somewhat obtuse comments, from Friday’s paper --
“Many men of peace in American churches -- clergymen and laymen -- have observed in some other pulpits and other congregations a tendency to revive the moral urge to war which made some churchmen recruiting agents for intervention in the other world war. The men of peace are trying to counteract in public opinion the warlike men of their cloth. The peaceful could tell the bellicose if they are more English than American that their consciences being so involved should lead them abroad to work personally for the cause in which they are enlisted. They should not remain here to conscript the sons of other families to assault the Siegfried line. If a nation has any moral rights it is to keep the peace. If a nation’s authorities have any moral duties one is to protect the people from avoidable war. And certainly peace has its shrine in religion.”
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