Rearmament Roundup

The most war-minded country in the world might be the one which is spending most today on Rearmament, and last week statisticians of the Foreign Policy Association figured that the latest rearmament budgets of the Great Powers entitle the Bolsheviks to rank first.

In 1936 the national defense expenditure of Japan was 307 million dollars, France 716 million, Italy 870 million, United Kingdom 846 million, U. S. 964 million, Germany 2,600 million, Soviet Union 2,963 million.

World spending on Rearmament totaled 10,730 million dollars, and of this 8,879 million was spent by Britain and the Continent, thus making Europe as a whole Public Enemy No. 1 of Peace--except that each country insists its Rearmament is solely to preserve peace, thus making Europe in 1937 the Public Friend No. 1 of Peace.

The colossal scope of Bolshevik preparation for Peace was shown last week by the fact that although the Soviet Budget carries the burden of Russia's entire national economy, and is loaded with all kinds of Five-Year-Plan economic costs which private capital would carry in other countries, J. Stalin is spending more than one-fifth of the entire Red budget making ready to fight. Germany spent in 1936 seven times as much as in 1934. Russia only tripled her expenditures in the same period but is still ahead of Germany. Together the Bolsheviks and Nazis spent in 1936 on future war more than all the rest of the world combined.

In Manhattan it was estimated last week that 1,000 million dollars, or about one-tenth of the world's entire current rearmament bill, is being spent for fighting aircraft alone. Vice President Howard S. Welch of Bendix Aviation Corp. figured that 62,349 serviceable planes exist today, about one-third of them war planes, and that in 1937 an additional 28,500 planes are being built, four-fifths of them war planes.

In London last week the Chancellor of the Exchequer, hawk-nosed, hawk-minded Neville Chamberlain, told the House of Commons that, although at least $5,000,000 is going to be spent every weekday for the next five years on rearming the United Kingdom, "it may be that in the end we shall find that even this has not represented the total amount this country has been compelled to spend."

In Ottawa last week, Canadian M.P.'s from the West demanded to know whether the Dominion Government has given or is about to give the United Kingdom "a blank check which might be filled in with the lives of young Canadians." This emotional question Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King quietly and flatly answered thus: "There are no commitments and no understandings in the nature of commitments between this Government and the Government of Great Britain or any other Government."

Since Rearmament gives so much employment at high wages to the working man, no Labor M.P. seriously opposed Rearmament in debate last week, and in The City shares in British armament and allied firms rose on the Exchange some 20%. Nobody paid much attention to Laborite Sir Stafford Cripps's remark: "We are witnessing the most magnificent subscription to a world suicide pact ever publicized by any country in the world."

"Feeling of Security." In the course of further Rearmament debate in the House last week Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made unobtrusively perhaps the most important declaration from His Majesty's Government since the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933. A basic tenet of Nazi policy today is that, excluding Soviet Russia, the rest of Europe including Britain must unite in a Western Pact. This regional pact to guarantee peace only on Germany's frontiers in the West, leaving the Fatherland free to wage war in the East, has long been resisted by France with her doctrine of "collective security," and of course by Russia. Dictator Stalin would be glad to sign an Eastern Pact with Germany but finds Der Fuhrer utterly cold to that. In the making of any pact for peace or war in Europe the weight of Britain in the scale of decision may well throw it one way or the other and last week the words uttered so casually by Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin were heavy with fate. He was speaking just after the House had endorsed his Rearmament program in its preliminary stage. Mournful-faced, the Prime Minister said:

"His Majesty's Government has not lost hope in devoting its efforts to maintain peace by a pact to take the place of the old Locarno Pact with the old Locarno powers. I think it may well be in the immediate future that the most hopeful prospect is the prospect of the regional pact. It is worth anything and everything in Europe today to get a feeling of security --at any rate in one part--from which that security, if once attained, may spread to other parts of the Continent. Were there a pact--I am not speaking of collective security through the whole of Europe--for mutual assistance against aggression between the nations of Western Europe, I hold and believe that such a pact could maintain peace."

The Significance. In these words of the Prime Minister the significant three were "old Locarno powers." Emphatically the Soviet Union was not one of the "old Locarno powers" which Mr. Baldwin hopes to get together as new Locarno powers. In other words the Prime Minister, by his deft use of "Locarno," said clearly, although not wantonly calling a spade a spade, that the British Government are now with the German Government and the Italian Government in wishing to make a Western Pact of the type desired by Adolf Hitler, to the exclusion of the Soviet Union. Mr. Baldwin's unanswerable argument for this is that it would give a "Feeling of Security" and not even the logical French can prove or disprove a feeling. Over in Paris last week Premier Leon Blum was facing the awful dilemma whether Paris should loosen its ties with Moscow, move with London and Rome nearer to Berlin to achieve a "Feeling of Security." "Mr. Smith." Obviously this week the Western Pact of Adolf Hitler's dreams and schemes was not yet in the bag, but Ambassador von Ribbentrop received the significant British honor of being invited to a house party at Knowsley Hall by the Earl of Derby, great & good friend of King George V & Queen Mary, not hitherto rated pro-German and in British Government circles one of the most influential aristocrats in the Kingdom. Derby took the course of advising British editors that his entertaining of von Ribbentrop was a "purely private affair" and that "any talk will be confidential." He expected the Kingdom's newsorgans to unite in keeping his hush-hush house party hushed but there are too many British Jews in journalism for that. Instantly news of the Ribbentrop-Derby "confidential talk" leaked into anti-Nazi quarters and next morning the New York Times printed as news that Lord Derby "is held to have committed one of the first blunders of his long career."

Jubilating Nazis meanwhile hailed von Ribbentrop as the Nazi who secured from Britain a treaty giving Germany the right to tear up the naval clauses of the Treaty of Versailles (TIME, June 24, 1935); the man who not only gave the Nazi salute to new King George at a levee (TIME, Feb. 15), but later presented 17 Nazis, all of whom injected Nazi saluting into Court etiquet; and finally this week as the Nazi persuader who is out to make peace in the West while the world's biggest Rearmament investments are made by Germany and Russia for War in the East. Russia is the only Great Power which could possibly be whipped in 1937 or 1938 by Germany, and then only in conjunction with Japan. Herr von Ribbentrop has thought of that too and so has Mr. Baldwin. Three months ago at No. 10 Downing Street the Prime Minister and the German Ambassador had a long talk. From this Herr von Ribbentrop drove directly to Croydon, flew to Berlin and there signed for the German Government its treaty with the Japanese Government uniting these powers against Communism and the World Revolution of the World Proletariat fomented by the Comintern from Moscow. With deliberate Japanese-German irony this pact is not directed against the Soviet Union, only against Moscow's Communism.

Tokyo dispatches last week reported such high "Rearmament fever" that Japanese miscreants were stealing knobs off doors, absconding with household plumbing, selling their metallic loot to the Imperial Government's munitions foundries & shipyards.

The U. S. Government was not yet stealing doorknobs but was so crucially short of metal for Rearmament that President Roosevelt had to call for action.

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