"Implements of War"

Rifles and carbines using ammunition in excess of cal. 26.5; revolvers and automatic pistols of a weight in excess of 1 pound 6 ounces; machine guns, automatic rifles and machine pistols of all calibres; guns, howitzers and mortars; high-powered steel-jacketed ammunition; filled and unfilled projectiles and propellants with a web thickness of .015 inch or greater; grenades, bombs, torpedoes and mines; tanks, military armored vehicles and armored trains; vessels of war of all kinds; aircraft, assembled or dismantled; aerial gun mounts and frames, bomb racks, torpedo carriers and bomb or torpedo release mechanisms; propellers or air screws, fuselages, hulls, tail units and undercarriage units; Livens projectors and flame throwers; mustard gas, lewisite, ethyldichlorarsine and methyldichlorarsine. .

All this deadly apparatus was proclaimed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt last week to be "arms, ammunition and implements of war," whose makers must register with the State Department by Nov. 29, after which date they are prohibited from importing or exporting any of the designated materiel without license. According to inquisitorial Senator Gerald Prentice Nye of North Dakota and other framers of the Neutrality Act, under whose authority the proclamation and listings were made, a great big step had been, taken toward clamping a strict supervision on the domestic armament trade, keeping the U. S. out of war. A bureau called the Arms & Munitions Control Office, set up m the State Department, was to do the actual supervisory work. As soon as they learned that this bureau's chief is Joseph Coy Green, '08, Princetonians trembled for the nation's armorers, were satisfied that the U. S. will be no party to gunrunning so long as "Joe" Green is in office. Joe Green is a wiry gentleman of 48 with a Prussian haircut, a bristling mustache, a savage intolerance of human shortcomings. In the lazy 1920's he devised and taught a course at Princeton called "Historical Introduction." It embraced practically all fields of knowledge, flunked the inefficient and unwary right & left. With his steel-trap mind and caustic tongue, Joe Green was known and feared as the toughest professor who ever trod the campus. Also one of the most picturesque, he was surrounded by a body of exciting legend.

After the last European war broke out Joe Green went to Belgium with Herbert Hoover to administer relief, was said to have narrowly missed execution in front of a German firing squad. In 1917 he was commissioned a Major in the U. S. Army, served in the Office of Orders & Reports at General Pershing's headquarters. After that he was American relief chief in the broiling Near East and Rumania, where he was supposed to have formed a firm friendship with Queen Marie. Back home he managed Herbert Hoover's abortive campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1920, returned to Princeton to knock facts into undergraduates. In 1930 Joe Green decided to put his friendship with the Great Engineer to profit by joining the State Department as a Drafting Officer in the Division of Western European Affairs As a sideline he took on the job of making the entrance examinations for foreign service aspirants as stiff as those given by the British Foreign Office.

Joe Green also set out to make himself an international armament expert became such a specialist that he was chosen last year to be the State Department's liaison man with Senator Nye's munitions investigation. Long before the President's proclamation last week, he had his office running smoothly. With his assistant and fellow-Pnncetonian. Charles Woodruff Vost, a 28-year-old State Department cub, he it was who drafted the list of wartime contraband which President Roosevelt charged him with controlling. Mortars, machine guns and methyldichlorarsine are obvious munitions of war. But what about such equally useful, basic implements of war as steel, copper, cotton? In case of hostilities, would an embargo be placed on them, too? Washington wiseacres thought not.* Ever since Benito Mussolini began his dangerous animal act featuring the terrified Lion of Judah and the terrifying Lion of Britain, U. S. cotton and copper producers have enjoyed a brisk business with Italy. According to Capital observers, if the Presidential definition of "implements of war" were enlarged to its logical boundaries to include such raw materials, Washington would become a pandemonium of log rolling, back-scratching and lobbying which would knock the neutrality program into a cocked helmet.

*Commented Secretary of Commerce Roper himself a cotton grower: ''How would we determine the amount of cotton a nation might have from us? Would we be governed by the average exports to that nation over a five-year period, or limit the amount to actual spindle requirements?''

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.