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Show lllBfiiiwtoh Washington, D. C. BIG DAY FOB NEWS MEN Twenty newspaper men leaned forward around the long blue baize table In the ante-room of the secretary secre-tary of state. At the extreme end stood tall, austere acting secretary, Sumner Welles. On his face was an expression of grim-llppcd Intensity. In his hand was a typewritten state-merit. state-merit. He read it aloud. It was a scathing, carefully worded blast against Japan. At the opposite end of the table stood three Japanese news men, short, affable, eager. For months and years they had been attending press conferences, given the same privileges as any American newt men. For months also they had waited for some such bombshell. Now it came. j One split second after Welles fln-j ished reading his statement, the Japanese were out the door, pattering pat-tering down the marble corridor to the press room telephones. It was a big day for Japanese news men. j Finally Ickea Wins. I It was also a big day for certain! members of the Roosevelt cabinet. For months and years they also had I been waiting. For months and years also they had been urging Roosevelt to embargo oil shipments to Japan. At a cabinet meeting Just before Japan moved, Secretary Ickes, as new oil administrator, raised the embargo em-bargo question again. He proposed to stop oil shipments to Japan. But the acting secretary of state said no. Japan, he said, was going to make a move toward Indo-China and it would be wiser to wait. Once before, Icfces had stopped a shipment of oil to Japan and aroused the wrath of the state department. Last June a Philadelphia manufacturer manufac-turer complained to him that a Japanese Jap-anese ship was loading 240,000 gallons gal-lons of lubricating oil. "I can't get oil myself to speed up my own defense orders," wrote the manufacturer, "and yet I see in front of my nose this shipment of oil going to Japan. To hell with defense, if the government Is as screwy as that." So Ickes called the coast guard and asked them to act before the oil was loaded. They did. Then things began to boil. It did not leak out at the time, but the state department complained to the White House that Ickes' action had interfered with the policy of appeasing appeas-ing Japan so she would not go south to the Dutch East Indies. However, Ickes held his ground. He Insisted that he was not meddling med-dling in foreign policy, but that it was nonsense to ration oil and gas on the Atlantic seaboard and at the same time let Japan ship oil away from the Atlantic seaboard. In the end Ickes won. Bombard Tokyo. Naval strategists make no secret as to what they would do to curb Japan. They consider it foolhardy and suicide to send a lot of U. S. warships across the vast expanse of ccean to Singapore or the Dutch East Indies. They figure we are going to get Into the war anyway, and it is good strategy to deal knockout blows in the very first round. They favor sending waves of U. S. bombers from the Philippines to raze the paper and bamboo cities of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe and Osaka. They also favor sending the fleet, plus airplane carriers to the coast of Japan. Ja-pan. They favor doing this immediately. immediate-ly. There Is no use, say the navy men, of punching at a man's legs when you can strike for his heart. CLOSING PANAMA TO JAPAN Secretary Stimson was telling the absolute truth when he denied that the discovery of a time-bomb was responsible for keeping 10 Japanese ships out of the Panama canal. For this was not the reason. Real reason why the canal was barred to the Japanese was the discovery dis-covery that two of their ships were floating bazars being rushed to the east coast of South America to grab off the trade which Axis operators were forced to abandon as a result of the U. S. blacklist. Apparently the Japs had a tip that the blacklist was going to be issued, because the two ships hastily hasti-ly left the west coast and were waiting wait-ing to go through the canal, when suddenly the blacklist was published. Equipped with elaborate merchandizing merchan-dizing displays, and carrying high- powered, Spanish-speaking salesmen, sales-men, the ships were literal arsenals of economic warfare. With them, the Japanese would have invaded the most lucrative markets in Latin America before either the U. S. or j I the Latin Americans could have 1 moved to block them. i ... MERRY-GO-ROUND ' U. S. authorities are quietly keep- j ing an rye on Andre Maurois, well- i knowr French writer, who has departed de-parted on a mysterious "private mission" to South America. Maurois is strongly pro-Vichy and is suspected suspect-ed of going south for the purpose of plugging the Nazi-controlled French regime. j The army's new heavy tank is ; equipped not only with machine guns and a 75-mm. gun. but also with a nice shiny horn to keep soldiers : themselves from getting in the way. j 1 |