THE ORIENT: Truce was a Truce

What the gentleman from Ulster said to the gentleman from Kerry—”Sure and you have said many things new and true, but the things which were new were not true and the things which were true were not new”—applies to the strangely confused words which have recently come from Tokyo. The core of the confusion was Japan’s relations with Russia. Official statements and private guesses alike were a series of obfuscations, contradictions, flat denials, inconsistencies. Generals belied statesmen, statesmen seemed not to know what generals were doing.

But last week came reports which were shockingly new, inescapably true. For seven days on end the Japanese were consistent. First, they rearranged their continental high command. Supreme command of forces in China was given to one of the Army’s best strategists, Toshizo Nishio. Recently resigned War Minister Seishiro Itagaki was made Lieut. General Nishio’s Chief of Staff. Command of the Kwantung Army, the able if imaginative force which since May 11 had been making the barren plains of Manchukuo a bramble of practically uncountable wrecked Russian planes, was given to one of the Army’s best diplomats, Lieut. General Yoshijiro Umezu, already Japanese Ambassador to Manchukuo. It looked (but no one dared say so, since Japanese are as unpredictable as shooting stars) as if Japan wanted to talk gently with Russia and deal roughly with China.

Sure enough, next day, Commander-Ambassador Umezu sang a pretty overture: the “present deplorable situation” on the Manchukuo-Mongolia border, he said, was merely the result of the Russians not wanting to negotiate a definite boundary line, which Japan had always wanted to do.

And in China the Japanese pressed ahead. Copying the British fashion, they bombed with leaflets. But as usual the copy was inexact: not following British restraint, the Japanese simultaneously bombed with bombs, horribly, killing 400 and wounding 400 in Lu-chow, a city without medical supplies. In Shanghai the Japanese military moved towards a showdown with foreigners. U. S., British, French and Italian defense-force commanders were called together and told that international defense of the International Settlement ought to give way to Japanese defense—of what would then no longer be an International Settlement. But lest this be construed as a tug at Uncle Sam’s goatee, Japan meanwhile continued to polish an apple for its teacher in western ways. Japanese Ambassador Kensuke Horinouchi called on Secretary of State Cordell Hull in Washington as the first step in “adjusting relations.”

All this indicated that the course was clearly charted. Avoid Scylla, the Russian Army, and Charybdis, the U. S. Fleet, and sail straight through to victory in China. Big news of the week was getting past Scylla.

From Moscow came word that Ambassador Shigenori Togo and Premier-Foreign Commissar Vyacheslaff Molotov had signed a truce. Outer Mongolia-Man-chukuo fighting would stop at once, border delimitations begin. With mutual kisses still wet on the unblushing cheeks of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, the world jumped, too soon, to the conclusion that Japan and Russia would also make strange love. The Japanese soon announced that a non-aggression pact between Japan and Russia was “not under consideration.” The truce was simpler than that. Russia had some important business in Poland, Japan in China—business so urgent that fighting over a few of the bleakest square miles in the world seemed mutually futile. The truce was a truce, not a military alliance. If a military alliance did eventually arise, then the world would indeed have something to be surprised at. Japan’s consistent policy since 1914 has been aimed at hegemony in Asia—not half a hegemony.

In the 19th Century and the first two decades of the 20th, China lived on hopes that the white men would fall to fighting each other and leave her alone. They fought in 1914-18 and millions of them were fighting again last week; but still China was the loser. Those white men who had been helping her a little to fend off other yellow men’s attacks were now too busy even to do that. By innocence, weakness, timidity, China had got herself in for what promised to be a furious autumn campaign. Last week the campaign began. The theatre: South China. The tactic: a flanking movement to cut the rich rump of China from every blood supply.