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Show I national I! AFFAIRS Reviewed by CARTER FIELD j Pacific fleet units reported re-ported moving to Atlantic Atlan-tic to join sea patrols ... Expect end of auto production pro-duction for 'duration.' (Bell Syndicate WNU Service.) WASHINGTON. The rumors concerning con-cerning TJ. S. fighting ships coming through the Panama canal to do their part scouting and patroling in the Battle of the Atlantic are true. No official information is available, avail-able, and details could not be printed print-ed if known, under the voluntary censorship rulings. But it is not giving Germany any information to say that a large number of vessels of the U. S. navy which have been in the Pacific are now in the Atlantic, and there is no blinking the fact that Berlin knows why they moved. In fact Berlin probably knows just what ships have been so moved, for there is not a naval officer who does not believe that word is gotten to Germany about every ship, naval or merchant, which passes through the canal, with as much further information as to its destination, etc;, as can be obtained by Nazi observers in the Canal Zone. The really interesting part of the whole business, from a naval standpoint, stand-point, is that this withdrawal of a number of ships from the Pacific means that the administration is no longer worried about the Far Eastern East-ern situation. Conviction is growing here that Japan will make no move against Singapore or the Dutch East Indies in the near future. Japan has known for some time that there would be plenty of shooting shoot-ing right away if she made such a move. She has known also that the augmented force of big bombers bomb-ers at Manila and Singapore where the British have been receiving American made bombers for months despite the urgent need for them in Britain and Alexandria boded no good for her if hostilities should begin. VULNERABLE OIL RESERVE The importance of this particular threat is that the locations of all the Japanese military oil reserves are well known to both the British and American naval forces, and that it would be a simple matter to destroy de-stroy them, thus immobilizing the Japanese fleet. Ever since the earthquake of 1922 Japan has not dared to store her naval oil reserves underground. She lost virtually all her oil at that time when the earthquake opened up the underground storage vaults, and she has been afraid to risk it since. Hence her oil reserves are particularly particu-larly vulnerable to air attack. Japan has plenty of fighting and bombing planes, but in this war it has been shown that while air power pow-er is tremendously important in attack, at-tack, it is almost impossible to prevent pre-vent bombing by the enemy no matter mat-ter how inferior his air strength. Thus the British have been able to bomb German cities and the French, Belgian, Dutch and German ports almost at will, despite the fact that the Nazi air force has been tremendously tre-mendously superior. Had Japan moved into the Dutch East Indies immediately after the invasion by Germany of the low countries, the resistance there would have been pitiful. Now it is a different dif-ferent story. The Dutch have moved heaven and earth to provide a defense, de-fense, so that it would be a real battle. That might not deter the Japanese, but the U. S. and British threat behind it are now believed to be conclusive. So Japan will wait, hoping that, with German victory, her path to plunder in the Far East will no longer be blocked. Auto Production And 'Curtailment' Pessimists in the automobile industry in-dustry predict that another six months will see the end of production produc-tion of passenger cars in this country coun-try for the "duration." Incidentally representatives of the industry in Washington are particularly bitter about the proposed restrictions on the manufacture of trucks. They are perfectly willing to accept a total to-tal blackout so far as passenger vehicles ve-hicles are concerned, as a national defense necessity, but they insist that the biggest problem confronting confront-ing the country, and from a national na-tional defense standpoint only, is going go-ing to be transportation. Hence, they contend, trucks will prove to be of extreme importance. Truck production may be limited for a while, but when the national preparedness drive really gets hot there will be clamor from the government gov-ernment for increased truck production. produc-tion. In World War No. 1 transportation transporta-tion soon became one of the major problems. The government eventually eventu-ally took over the railroads and operated op-erated them all from Washington, tn those days the highways were pretty poor compared with now, and '.he heavy movement over them, coupled with a terrific winter in 1917-1918, left them anything but a motorist's paradise. |