Cradle Into Backyard

On an island in the Pacific which is smaller than California in area, and no less mountainous, lives a population over half the size of the U. S. people. These unfortunates--the Japanese--are like a rush-hour crowd in a subway car, the doors of which have jammed. Fortnight ago Japanese papers loudly warned that the East Indies ought to be an emergency exit; and that Western Powers had better help open the door. Last week Japan's arms implemented the warning.

Jumping off from Hainan Island, which the Japanese have held by squatters' rights since February, a combined Army-Navy party braved a monsoon and heavy rain, landed on the China coast near Pakhoi, about 100 miles from the Indo-Chinese border, and thence drove inland toward the city of Nanning. This was their long-expected drive to cut the routes to China from French Indo-China and British Burma. It was a threat not only to China (which will be dry as a rootless tree if the routes are cut) but also to French and British and indirectly Dutch and U. S. interests in the Far East.

Japan's troops, who were able as usual to make an unresisted landing, pushed inland rapidly, advancing 30 miles in three days. The Chinese said they were dropping back to draw their enemy across the coastal plain into hills where they could be disastrously stopped. But this tactic would not prevent the Japanese from establishing air bases on the plain, from which they could easily and systematically bomb the two supply routes.

The colonial powers scarcely needed this landing, or the newspaper campaign introducing it, to inform them of Japan's ambitions in their spheres of empire. There had been previous signals: the peremptory seizure of Hainan, the occupation of the strategic Spratly Islands, the frank avowal of many a world-imperialist Japanese. Punctuating the European war as it did, the landing served rather to make the world review just what was still to be found in the treasure of the Indies. Were the outposts worth defending?

The Indies, once the bourn of every explorer, source of spices and plumes and gold, home of the noble savage, Ophir, cradle of wealth, land of the faraway dream, are now the backyard of squabbling empires. Six captious countries have their pieces:

The Netherlands has the richest share: Sumatra, Java, the Celebes, most of Borneo, half of Timor and of New Guinea.

Great Britain has most of Malaya, Burma, Sarawak, the other half of New Guinea, and Hong Kong.

Hong Kong was once a valve controlling the flow of fabulous trade out of South China. Then the Japanese got a valve of their own farther up the pipe at Canton, and Hong Kong became a comparatively dead city. It is still one of the most beautiful ports in the world--its harbor is like a Wedgwood plate full of sugar buns--but it is now a negligible trade centre, and Britain plans to abandon it at the drop of a bomb.

Britain acquired its share of New Guinea in two lumps: 90,540 square miles as a grab in 1883, 68,500 square miles as a League of Nations mandate from Germany in 1919. The Reich is of course not forgetting this. Hitler could use the rubber, coconut and sisal plantations of British New Guinea.

Burma is at once the widest open door to China (via the famed Rangoon-Kunming Road, and by rail) and the most active area of Japanese underground activity. Burma has the biggest petroleum company in the British Empire (Burmah Oil Co., Ltd.; production, 800,000 tons a year). It also has just about the most cursed climate.

Sarawak, the northwestern fringe of Borneo, is virtually the private estate of a British family named Brooke. Best known for headhunters and "Princess Baba" (Valerie Brooke), who married a wrestler, Sarawak exports condiments, nuts, birds' nests, rattan, rubber.

Most important British area is Malaya, and its most important centre is Singapore, "Gibraltar of the East," thought to be the one really impregnable fortress in the Indies. Drawstring on the narrow trade route through the Straits of Malacca, it will serve as the base of Allied activity, if any, in the Orient. The Japanese wish to make Singapore another useless Hong Kong by cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Kra above it; but while the British lion has so much as a flicker left to its tail, the plan will be balked. Malaya is rich with rubber, tin, gold, iron.

France has Indo-China, which is not, properly speaking, a colony, but an amalgam of a colony (Cochin China), four protectorates (Annam, Tongking, Cambodia, Laos) and a special territory (Kwangchowan). Its principal towns, Haiphong and Saigon, are coastal, tropical, sickly hot; its forests are alive with mosquitoes, ants, leeches; but inland it has mountains and gorges of incredible beauty, and in Cambodia is the ancient temple of Angkor Wat, one of the musts for every round-the-world sightseer. The French have at their disposal the best native troops and the second best naval base (Camranh Bay) in the Indies, but do not wish to use them if they can help it. French officials discreetly announced last week that they were not disturbed by the Japanese landing at Pakhoi.

Portugal, which used to own the plums of empire, now has only two puny raisins: dirty, slack Macao, degenerated into a small fishing town near Hong Kong; and half of Timor Island, which has piddling exports of coffee, copra, hides, cacao, shells, wax.

Japan's pieces so far are like grains of salt beside the Western steaks. The Spratly and Mandated Islands are at present little but potential springboards to bigger things. But Japan's ambition is unbounded; vaster, probably, than her capacity to accomplish. Her severest problem will be supply. Her Navy can force any East Indian stronghold except Singapore, but holding the conquest is another matter. A 3,000-mile supply line is desperately long.

U. S. Pacific empire consists of the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii, Alaska, first two of which fall within the immediate sphere of Japanese ambition. Both of them Japan could probably both force and supply (from the Mandated Islands), but as long as the U. S. stands by its promise of independence for the Philippines in 1946, violent action is unnecessary. Japanese ascendancy after independence will be almost automatic. Japan is already getting a foothold not only in gold mining, but in the production of essential minor products--iron, copper, chromium, manganese; sugar, tobacco, hemp, copra.

Retentionist sentiment, both in the Philippines and the U. S., has recently grown rapidly. If Japan plans to move in the day after the U. S. moves out, why move out? This week Commander in Chief of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet Admiral Thomas C. Hart and Shanghai Consul General Clarence E. Gauss sail for Manila aboard U. S. S. Augusta for consultations with Francis B. Sayre, U. S. High Commissioner to the Philippines, on the subject of U. S. interests in Asia, and the extent to which the U. S. should stand watch over Allied interests. Last week France followed the lead of Great Britain in reducing her North China garrison.

If each nation had to decide whether or not to keep its individual East Indian possessions on the basis of its isolated value to the national economy, the West would doubtless leave the East. But the imperial nations must keep an eye on each other.

It is not simply a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. It is a question of help ing to keep the little Fuller Brush man out of the Joneses' kitchen for fear that he will soon get into everyone's front parlor.

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