"Hit Back Harder"

With world headlines screaming the nearest thing to outbreak of a Russo-Japanese war, U. S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies was last week a busy conciliator in Moscow, conferring with pegleg Japanese Ambassador Mamoru Shigemitsu and portly Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff between the bouts of these two diplomats over a pair of uninhabited islands covered with swamp grass which seemed capable of setting Eastern Asia more or less aflame.

A bomb thrown by an insurgent Korean some years ago lodged 32 splinters in Mr. Shigemitsu's leg and forced its amputation. Today he stumps briskly about, aided by a heavy, crooked cane, and last week he was up night after night, stumping into the Soviet Foreign Office at all hours, even after Comrade Litvinoff had gone home to bed, to have just one more go at such able Communist diplomats as bald Boris Stomoniakoff, the Vice-Commissar.

In its opening stages the Japanese-Russian quarrel was based on flatly contradictory statements by Tokyo and Moscow about something alleged to have occurred on the murky Amur River, which for much of its length forms the frontier between Soviet Siberia and Japan's puppet empire of Manchukuo (see map). Ambassador Shigemitsu was instructed to say that Japanese and Manchukuoan soldiers, while peacefully swimming in the Amur, had been fired upon by a Soviet gunboat, soon sunk by the avenging fire of their shore batteries. To this Commissar Litvinoff replied that a Japanese-Manchukuoan gunboat had opened fire on a Soviet outpost and that as the affray proceeded a Soviet gunboat had indeed been sunk. Soviet lives lost were two, according to Moscow, but Tokyo claimed its guns had slain 37.

Exactly where all this happened, since the Amur is a meandering stream of several courses, weaving its way among sandbars and low-lying islands which it frequently engulfs, was a matter of some doubt in the minds of Comrade Litvinoff and Mr. Shigemitsu, no matter how precisely they both tried to talk. Two islands known colloquially as "Hayfield" and "Main" emerged from the bickering as places where whatever happened was passionately declared to have occurred. Meanwhile plenty of war-scare was built up by the world press out of plenty of facts which last week cropped up.

It had been known right along in Moscow that the Government was going to ask its people to dig into their pockets for another $800,000,000 loan, but the fact that subscriptions were opened last week was whooped into headlines suggesting that Russia, provoked by Japan, had suddenly made this major war-loan gesture in retort.

It happens that the only Japanese general of prominence who has been permitted to travel in the Soviet Union for some time is Major General Masaharu

Homma who escorted Prince Chichibu at the Coronation, of George VI. Last week he arrived "disappointed in the Soviet Union generally. . . . Japan need have no fear of the Red Army. . . . The executions of several of its chiefs have seriously weakened it. ... The Red Army in fact is on the verge of collapse. It has been vastly over-rated."

In Moscow excited correspondents filed dispatches recalling Stalin's words of several months ago: "The Soviet Union does not want an inch of anyone's territory and will not yield an inch of its own!"

As one round of lurid headlines followed another, certain basic developments slowly emerged. Although Japanese newsorgans, many of whose owners are wealthy pacifists or moderates, were piling up scare-statistics last week of Russia's immense military and air strength in Siberia, the Imperial Japanese Cabinet headed by Premier Prince Konoye kept pressing their Ambassador in Moscow to demand that Soviet forces simply clear out of the disputed Amur region, and Soviet Commissar Litvinoff kept on being extremely bland, while the Moscow press became almost the only one in the world to play down the whole story and tuck it away under small heads. Such things were featured as that U. S. Ambassador Davies had called upon Commissar Litvinoff and they had "exchanged hopes that tension . . . soon would be eased." All this was in sharp contrast to Soviet handling of Siberian frontier incidents in the recent past. For about two years, as one Soviet official remarked recently in speaking of these chronic shooting affrays, "our policy has been to hit back just a little harder than we are hit."

Such seemed not to be the Kremlin policy last week. Without actually piping down, Commissar Litvinoff presently piped peaceful overtures to Ambassador Shigemitsu, suggesting that both sides simultaneously withdraw their forces. This was followed by Soviet announcements that, since the Japanese-Manchukuoans had withdrawn, the Soviet forces had withdrawn too. Any remaining points such as who owns the two islands--which have long been claimed by both the Russians and the Japanese-Manchukuoans--could be settled by negotiations later.

Actual movements of forces on the Amur were in some doubt, but according to all concerned a Soviet gunboat had been sunk, and to this punch Moscow did not seem to have replied with a more vigorous blow--a fact looming much bigger in the East, where not to lose "face" is considered more important, than in the West. Observers concluded that the Japanese had simply been engaged in feeling the Russians out, trying to discover by experiment whether the execution in Moscow of a marshal and seven generals of the Red Army is likely to cramp the Kremlin's style or not. The order withdrawing Soviet forces from the tense Amur area last week was signed, all Russia marked well, by the leading and most popular Soviet military figure Marshal Klimentry ("Klim") Voroshilov, Commissar of Defense.

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