THE BIGGEST RAIDS ON BRITAIN YET. A hundred districts in Britain hit with bombs, including thirty in London, according to the Associated Press. Robert F. Post of the New York Times calls it the capital’s "worst day of the war." He says the Midlands and Liverpool were also heavily hit. The Times story adds that "the almost continuous assault, coming on the heels of Monday night’s longest alert to date, when buildings all over the metropolis crashed, added up to what was regarded as certainly one of the most destructive periods in the siege of London." So much for the talk of last week of a "lull" in the bombing, the invasion being called off, etc. The British Isles are still very much in danger.
On the other hand, Edward Murrow said in his latest talk from London on C.B.S. that the shower of explosives, oil bombs and incendiaries didn’t have the devastating effect that Germans were hoping for -- "what a puny effort is this to burn a great city." He paid special tribute to London’s firemen, a hundred of whom have given their lives in the past month to make possible a routine phrase in the morning’s war communiques --"All the fires were quickly brought under control."
A "GENERAL CRISIS" IN THE FAR EAST? As expected, the British have announced plans to re-open the Burma road on Oct. 18. In contrast to an earlier warning in a Tokyo newspaper that doing so would lead to war, Hugh Byas reports in Wednesday’s New York Times that the Japanese press "in unanimous chorus finds the reopening of the Burma road just what had been expected and minimizes its effects." The Roosevelt Administration, on the other hand, appears to be playing things up -- Secretary of State Hull has advised the 16,000 Americans living in the Far East to leave immediately. Britain’s ambassador to the U.S., Lord Lothian, has been ordered to cancel a planned leave, and explained to the press his superiors believe "there might be a general crisis" involving Japan. Wilfrid Fleisher of the New York Herald Tribune says the Japanese are blaming the U.S. and Britain more or less co-equally, which means that in a crisis the two English-speaking nations will be treated as a formal alliance, even though they’re not. Not yet, anyway.
The Chicago Tribune goes farther than the Japanese press -- it blames the Roosevelt Administration entirely for the prospect of a Far East crisis. Hardly have the Tribune’s isolationist rantings been crazier than in Wednesday’s editions, where Walter Trohan’s front-page "news" story begins with these words -- "Government officials moved on many fronts today to bring what they described as the ‘far eastern crisis’ nearer, recalling that election day is less than a month away." The headline -- "New Deal Stirs Up ‘War Crisis’ Over Far East." Considering this is the news coverage, you can guess how incendiary the editorial is. And incendiary it is -- "If the Japanese yield before his belligerent acts and threats, Mr. Roosevelt will have a diplomatic victory to place before the voters on election day. If the Japanese show no signs of yielding he will he will hope to have whipped up the war fever in this country and that, so he reckons, will help him also....for the furthering of his ambition to be the first President ever elected to a third term, is deliberately risking a war against a power with which we have had profitable commercial relations."
There you have it. Not a word about Japan’s years of aggression in China, her threats against Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, or what it would mean to U.S. security to have a Hitler ally running virtually the entire Far East. The shameful thing, to the Tribune, is that the President has ruined our "profitable commercial relations" with a fascistic empire, i.e., we’re no longer selling them the bullets they require to commit their murders. Do even the most primitive notions of morality have any place in the worldview of the isolationist crowd?
NO SURPRISE HERE. From the United Press on Friday --
"Japanese authorities indicated today that they might demand additional airdromes in Indo-China and a ‘credit loan’ to the Japanese army to support Japanese forces in the country. French officials asserted that the Japanese were overstepping the original terms of the agreement, which gave them airports in Indo-China and facilities for garrisoning troops, and said that the Japanese seemed aiming at bringing all of Tonking, the northern part of Indo-China, under their control. The Japanese already have concentrated forty airplanes at Hanoi and a garrison estimated at 600 mechanized troops. They are stringing military communication lines through Hanoi streets and have laid a cable in Haiphong harbor."
Doubtless Senator Nye or Senator Knutson will tell us that this, too, is all the Administration’s fault.
DOROTHY THOMPSON ENDORSES ROOSEVELT. It’s no doubt causing a stir among the readership of the "arch-Republican" New York Herald Tribune that Miss Thompson bolted ranks and endorsed President Roosevelt in her column Wednesday --
"The President can be a very great man in times of emergency. He was a great man in 1933, and he has been a great man since the overwhelming crisis in June. He has met that crisis, that swift and dangerous disaster, with speed, timing, and immense courage. He is the first President in our whole history to dare to call for conscription in the midst of an election campaign. In that he threw his political career into the scales. If some of Mr. Willkie’s partisans...have their way, this issue of life or death importance to the Nation will yet be exploited against the President and against our common safety....[The President] possesses the greatest single asset that any leader of a democratic state can have in a crisis like this – the confidence of the rank and file of workers that he will not use conscription and defense to betray democracy itself and destroy their freedom. Mr. Willkie might also in time come to have that confidence. I think he would. But he does not have it now. He would have to win it, and in winning it some of his supporters would be his greatest liability. Roosevelt has it, and time is of the essence."
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