Ultimatum and Blockade

From Chinwangtao, the seaside resort just below the Great Wall, to Singapore, the big British naval base at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, the coast of Eastern Asia rumbled last week with warlike activity. At Tientsin Japanese soldiers tightened their two-weeks-old blockade on the British Concession; at Chefoo and Tsingtao Japanese officials sponsored anti-British demonstrations; at Shanghai British Ambassador to China Sir Archibald Clark Kerr was surrounded with a heavy guard after "terrorists" had threatened his life; the Japanese captured one Chinese port, closed another, attacked two more (Foochow, Wenchow); at Hong Kong British troops feverishly erected barbed wire entanglements and built pillbox fortifications; at Singapore 44 French and British naval, military and air officers conferred on "common action" in the Far East.

Swatow. Japan's victory-of-the-week over China was at the treaty port of Swatow, 180 miles north of Hong Kong. Here Japan also suffered a minor diplomatic defeat from western nations. Once a city of 178,000, Swatow had been bombed by Japanese planes daily for the last ten weeks. All electric lights had been cut off, the waterworks were out of order, the municipal buildings were all destroyed. By day Swatow was a deserted city, but at night, when no bombers came, it hummed with shipping activity. To the port came British, French, U. S., Scandinavian ships bringing war materials. From Swatow they were taken overland in trucks to Shiuchow, 240 miles away, headquarters of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Southeastern Chinese Army.

Determined to put an end to this traffic, the Japanese last week sent seven warships to the port and after a brief shelling landed sailors and marines. In twelve hours the city was occupied. In the harbor, however, lay the U. S. destroyer Pillsbury and the British destroyer Thanet. On shore were 40 U. S. citizens, mostly missionaries, and 80 Britons. During the occupation of the city Japanese naval authorities peremptorily demanded that British and U. S. warships leave at short notice.

Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, commander-in-chief of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet, received the ultimatum on his flagship the cruiser Augusta, anchored off Chinwangtao, some 1,500 miles North, where he had gone after a brief inspection trip to Tientsin. He replied by 1) ordering the Pillsbury to remain, 2) dispatching another destroyer, the Pope, to the spot. The British seconded the U. S. by not only keeping the Thanet at Swatow but by sending the Scout to join her. Nothing happened to the ships, nor to any of the U. S. or British nationals ashore.

The Japanese, always worried about saving "face," were left explaining that they had delivered not an ultimatum but only a polite warning. Bolder at its distance, the Nazi press in Berlin, carried a headline: U. S. Admiral Is Agitator. The British, cornered at every turn in China, frankly admired the Admiral's quick, firm action. They might also admire the U. S. State Department. For months the Japanese have practiced the clever dodge of blaming any international scrape they got into in China on the military people on the spot. The U. S. has adopted the stalemate expedient of letting its military people on the spot take independent counteraction. Ever since the Chinese-Japanese War started Admiral Yarnell, tall, thin lowan, has had a free hand from Washington in dealing with emergencies. The Admiral has thus won several quarrels with the Japanese, and has probably saved U. S. citizens in China some of the humiliation and indignities that Britons have undergone. In answering so effectively Japan's ultimatum last week, the U. S. Admiral also notified Japanese authorities at Shanghai and the commander-in-chief of the Japanese Fleet in China, Vice-Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, that U. S. ships would go wherever U. S. lives or property were endangered.

Tientsin. Having backed down at Swatow, the Japanese military at Tientsin, where they claimed the British were harboring anti-Japanese terrorists (TIME, June 26), became ever bolder. Live wire encircled the British and French Concessions, had by week's end killed a cat and a coolie. As food got scarcer, 1,500 Britons within the area realized that for all practical purposes they were imprisoned. Those who tried to get in or out were stripped, searched, cuffed. The colony settled down to make the best of the situation. Unable to go to the British Country Club, outside the Concession, they frequented the Tientsin Club within the area. Whereas formerly only men were admitted there, women were now welcomed for the duration of "hostilities." Britons still dressed for dinner, and they played what cricket and polo they could.

Sanctions? As the mounting list of indignities reached the light of print in London, British ire rose. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, asked in Parliament what economic reprisals were planned, answered: "I do not think we have yet reached that stage." But the Prime Minister did refer to the "high-handed and intolerably insulting treatment of British subjects" in Tientsin and complained that the Japanese military had made the Tientsin incident a "pretext for far-reaching and quite inadmissible claims." The London Times cautiously recommended that the British Government at least look into the question of economic sanctions, and Conservative and Laborite M. P.'s joined in demanding firm action. There was even talk of retaliation against the many Japanese citizens living in the British Empire, and a Government spokesman broadcast the warning that Britain might be forced into "countermeasures for the protection of British rights." Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax called Japanese Ambassador Mamoru Shigemitsu to his office and gave him the talking to of his life. At Tokyo Sir Robert Leslie Craigie, the British Ambassador, also protested, conferred for a half hour with Foreign Minister Hachiro Arita on a basis for negotiation of a settlement of the British-Japanese deadlock at Tientsin. One point upon which negotiations waited was the Japanese insistence on holding conferences, not in Tokyo, but in Tientsin, with the British holding out for conversations right in Tokyo. On this point it seemed unlikely that the Japanese Foreign Office of the mild-mannered, hard-working Mr. Shigemitsu, who has tried his best to keep good relations with the British, would be able to accede. For by last week it was even more evident that the Japanese Army in North China and not the Japanese Government in Tokyo, was solely responsible for the Tientsin blockade and that the Army leaders alone could order the blockade lifted.

Right Address. Although the British could not diplomatically recognize him, the logical man to have dealt with was General Gen Sugiyama, commander of the North China Army. Former War Minister, a thorough soldier who believes in "action before words," General Sugiyama (along with others of the military caste) feels himself responsible only to the Emperor. Fifty-nine years old, he was once a military attache at Paris, at another time a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1926. The prattle of diplomats, the explanations of foreign offices, the fine points of parliamentarians are not, however, for him. Last week he bluntly reiterated the Army's price for raising the blockade: Britain's recognition of Japan's Asia-for-the-Asiatics policy.

The U. S. State Department still kept more or less aloof from the Tientsin trouble, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull did say that he was "observing with special interest" the "broader aspects" of the international issue. In Tokyo, meanwhile, four prominent Japanese reactionaries petitioned the Emperor to "declare belligerent rights" in the "China incident"--in other words, to declare war against China. Such a declaration would, indeed, give Japan the right to blockade the Chinese coast, but it would also certainly force President Roosevelt, according to existing U. S. neutrality legislation, to declare an embargo on munitions going to Japan.

Skirmish. As an added flourish to the week's war dance, the Japanese Army reported further fighting between Outer Mongolian (Soviet) and Manchukuo (Japanese) troops and planes. Wild Japanese claim was that 61 Soviet planes had been shot down in three days. From Moscow at first came only a stony silence, to be broken early this week with not quite as wild counterclaims: 59 Japanese, and only 23 Soviet planes, had been brought down in six weeks. But Soviet-Japanese skirmishes are the rule rather than the exception in the Far East. The real bad blood in China was between Japan and Great Britain. Scarcely appeasing to the British was the Domei News Agency's explanation of why Britons, and few other foreigners, were being searched and stripped in Tientsin: "All people ... are dealt with according to their individual merit. Britons are typically arrogant." The quarrel had become so serious that neither the British nor the Japanese could give way without a decided loss of "face." Face saving can be a fighting matter east of Suez.

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