Foreign News: Singapore Flanked

At 4:30 one steaming afternoon last week in Hanoi, Governor General Admiral Jean Decoux of Indo-China and Japan’s supreme penetrator General Issaku Nishi-hara sat down and signed an agreement. It permitted Japan to establish three air bases in Tonkin, the northern province of Indo-China, and to garrison the bases with about 6,000 troops. The French out-Japanesed the Japanese in their comments. Admiral Decoux called the agreement “one of the greatest marks of confidence one country can give another.” General Maurice Martin, Commander of the Indo-China Army, called it “the first manifestation of a durable friendship between France and Japan.” In Vichy, Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin called it “a gentleman’s agreement.” Five and one half hours later the friendly gentlemen of Japan went to work killing the confident gentlemen of France.

At 10 p.m. Japan’s South China Army gave the French garrison at Dong Dang notice that they were moving in. It was not clear whether the Dong Dang garrison had heard about that afternoon’s agreement, but in any case the agreement specified that Japanese troops should enter by the port of Haiphong, not by the China border. The French decided to resist. In a two-hour skirmish the French suffered about 100 casualties.

Next morning General Nishihara deferred “for the time being” the landing of troops at Haiphong, but the drive from the China border was carried to the enemy with energy. Tokyo newspapers hailed the “peaceful penetration.” French authorities put aside the honey and brought on the acid: “Anyone coming across the border in the middle of the night in combat formation and using arms is hardly friendly.”

The amiable penetration continued with new attacks in the north, which reached and passed the important railroad terminal of Langson, and with a bombing near Haiphong which killed 15 civilians and which the Japanese regretted extremely—for it was, they said, “an accident.”

Scarcely accidental was the timing of the Japanese drive. By the time the week was out, it was very clear that this Japanese attack was very much in line with Axis grand strategy. If downfall of the British Empire was to be accomplished by control of the Atlantic-Pacific seaways at Gibraltar, Suez and Singapore, it was to be the job of the Japanese to capture Singapore.

While the penetration of Tonkin was first of all a movement against South China, it was also the first move in consolidation of the flanks preceding an attack on Singapore. Since Thailand last week showed itself in complete sympathy with the Japanese by sending over French Indo-China a lone “token” bomber, and since there is a good railroad from Haiphong to strategic Saigon to the south, this single stroke practically sewed up the western flank. The eastern flank, comprising the Philippines and The Netherlands Indies, was also partially blanketed—by the three-way pact. The pact was largely directed at the U. S., and in Washington it was believed that an extension of the U. S. embargo to cover oil would mean an immediate Japanese move on Borneo, Sumatra and Java.

At week’s end French resistance fizzled out, on orders from Vichy. In that town of pathetic, hollow words Foreign Minister Baudouin reported to Premier Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain that all fighting had ceased. “Hence,” continued the Foreign Minister, who once made a fortune out of Indo-China, “the French-Japanese accord now goes into effect in the friendly, trustful spirit which prevailed at its establishment.”