INTERNATIONAL: Russo-Japanese War?

When the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact passed its first anniversary last week, Tokyo noted the day in stony silence, Moscow with a stern warning. “It is necessary,” said the Communist mouthpiece Pravda, “that the Japanese military and Fascist cliques, whose heads have been turned by military success, realize that their prattle about an annexationist war in the north may cause damage, first and most of all, to Japan herself.”

Smarting under the raid from U.S. bombers which showed how vulnerable Japan is at home (see p. 18), the Japanese found little to soothe them in Pravda’s words. On scores of airfields near Vladivostok (only 685 miles from Tokyo) hundreds of Soviet airplanes were tuned for action. Soon the weather would permit re-inforocements (if Soviet-Japanese neutrality lapsed into war) to be flown from the U.S. via Alaska. Ready to face the big Jap army in Manchukuo was a Red army (partially mechanized) of 700,000 men.

In world capitals there was doubt that Tokyo would heed Moscow’s warning. Japan is in much the same position as Germany was a year ago. In front of Japan, the war is going according to her plan, but dare she keep going without removing the threat in her rear? For years the Japanese press and her military leaders have shouted: “[We] cannot sleep peacefully a single hour. … To avert … a catastrophe it is necessary to strike quickly in the direction of Vladivostok.”

Poised for such a strike is a Jap army of 1,000,000 on the Manchukuoan frontier. Thousands of men are building new highways and railways over which the mechanized divisions would roll. Between 1934 and 1939 airfields along the Siberian border have been increased from 130 to 250. If Japan could afford the planes to stock these airfields and give her northern army aerial support, the chances of a drive on eastern Siberia would be better.

Whether Japan or Russia would attack first and when the blow would come was anybody’s guess. But one man made a guess last week that was noteworthy. In Russia and Japan (Doubleday, Doran; $2), Author Maurice Hindus, one of the few people outside the Soviet Union who gave the Russians a chance against the Nazi steam roller, wrote: “A war between Russia and Japan is … inevitable. . . . Only the sudden collapse of Japan would avert such a war. . . . Japan must strike at Russia . . . while the other end of the Axis fights Russia in Europe, or else forfeit all hope of ever becoming the dominant power on the mainland of Asia. . . .”