Sunday, October 13, 1940

NAZIS MOVE INTO RUMANIA. Rumania has been moving ever-closer to Axis domination -- the already-supplicant King Carol was overthrown last month in favor of a military regime under General Antonescu, who in the New Republic's words has been "trying to out-Hitler Hitler" in restrictions on Jews and stamping out political rights. And now, as C.L. Sulzberger reports in Saturday’s New York Times, German troops and warplanes are now rushing into Rumania, as the nation’s dwindling British colony prepares to pull out of the country completely. The United Press says that over 20,000 Nazi "training" troops have seized strategic positions throughout the country.

Ostensibly the German move is prompted by Rumania’s request that the Axis intervene to resolve continuing tensions along the new, German-decreed borders between Rumania and Hungary. No one believes this, of course, but hats off to the Turkish government for having the nerve to say so in plain language. According to the Associated Press, the official Turkish radio carried a statement Friday which solidified Turkey’s status as a non-belligerent ally of Britain and made it clear the Turks had no qualms about turning belligerent if the Nazi move into Hungary turns out to be a prelude to a German attack through Turkey and Syria --

"If it is the German intention to penetrate Egypt in this direction they surely know this road is not easy...This road across Anatolia is guarded by 2,000,000 bayonets. Such a move on Germany’s part would create many political complications and meet with very strong resistance."

It looks increasingly like the focus of the war for the next few months is going to shift from the British Isles to southeastern Europe, the Near East, and north Africa. And if Hitler wins the battles shaping up in those realms, he might in time gain such an economic stranglehold on the British Empire that an invasion of England would not even be needed to subdue his last great enemy.

WILLKIE LOOKS TO THE "FINAL DRIVE." Philip Kinsley tries to be upbeat in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune about Wendell Willkie’s prospects in the remainder of the campaign --

"Wendell L. Willkie enters the final weeks of the Presidential race confident that his cause will win altho aware that at present the states with big blocks of electoral votes are about evenly divided. The swing, particularly in the industrial centers, has began, he thinks, toward the Republican ticket, as a result of his constant preaching against the future financial insecurity of the New Deal methods as applied to social security and other labor gains on the books."

I’d love to know of any surveys where the Tribune is finding any "big blocks" of electoral votes "evenly divided" -- the last Gallup poll showed President Roosevelt ahead in forty-one states with a total of 499 electoral votes.

JAPAN QUIETS THE WAR TALK. Barnet Nover notes in his Washington Post column Friday that soon after Japanese newspapers thundered about the "inevitability" of war with America in the wake of the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo pact, Foreign Minister Matsuoka is holding out "something resembling an olive branch" to the U.S. There are some sound reasons for these second thoughts in Tokyo, Mr. Nover writes --

"If the United States and Great Britain should decide to place a complete embargo on all exports to and imports from Japan, the country’s industrial plant, and by the same token her war-making capacity, would soon be forced to operate at a very reduced pace. There would be no pig iron and petroleum from the United States, no nickel and lead from Canada, no wool from Australia, no tin and rubber from Malaya. no cotton and phosphate rock from Egypt. Her peace-time industries would, at the same time, be deprived of an overwhelming percentage of the markets still open to them....A war by Japan against the United States and Great Britain would have to be won speedily, before the island empire’s supplies began to run out."

Mr. Nover acknowledges that a program of economic sanctions against Japan by the U.S. and Britain might lead to "a Japanese attack on the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Hongkong and the International Settlement in Shanghai. Such a possibility must be taken into account. But even if Japan came into full and unhampered possession of those areas, and she could not do so without a struggle, the Japanese problem of supplies would remain extremely serious....There is no desire in this country to go to war with Japan. But there appears also to be no intention of allowing ourselves to be intimidated. This fact, apparently, has begun to trickle into the consciousness of the powers-that-be at Tokyo. That is why yesterday’s bellowing has been followed by today’s cooing."

BOMB SHELTER MANNERS. According to Larry Rue in Saturday’s Chicago Tribune, authorities in Birmingham, England, have drawn up a code of manners for behavior in air raid shelters. Mr. Rue writes that the city has banned from the shelters "singing, shouting, scattering of litter and people who drink too freely or bring countless cats with them."