T t » 1 LEAD _ 2 asked the United States rather than Japan to defenft Indo-Cnlna. The spokesman replied, using these wordX "We asked the United States a year ago what aid she could give us in Indo-China, but got nothing out of Washington." It has been rumored and widely believed that Vichy had given in to Tokyo because of pressure from Hitler. The Petain spokesman contradicted this, said that the yielding of those bases was completely independent (f the Axis tri-power pact: There had been no ultimatum from Japan,- no pressure from the Nazis. Meanwhile, Marshal Petain himself was making a speech in which he said somethingdifferent, ge declared that colonies other than Syria had been menaced but that France would fight with the same vigor as in Syria and save the honor of France, Fpom another source we hear that the Japanese fleet has been on the move south for as long as five days. That advice comes fronlphungking, from Admiral Tang, Chief of the Intelligence bureau of the Chinese War Operations Abroad. Seven -large Japanese men-o-war, three airplane carriers and fifty-three destroyers, are r liEAD. 3 on their way south; and^thirty trans^Sot^i^ j^ly Eighteenth. ty\r^L^(jP The news we now await ic lVTta-_^ lA^ cilzhrBati>-tet=y>ifeil iia Washington [have to say aboit this? There’s a report from London A A ^ that Great Britain and the Dijited Spates have already anticipated this Japanese move and are prepared to retaliate. Japanese assets in the British Empire and the United States will be frozen. That lsn*t official, but it sounds not improbable. Foreign Secretary i!'- ; Anthony Eden spoke about that Far Eastern situation in the Britl^ A House of Commons today. He uttered a warning to the Japanese to keep V hands off Thailand A and he denounced the campaign of ijowutBXiK innuendo in Japanese newspapers against Britain, denied that the British had any designs upon either Thailand or I^do-China. Some authorities in Washington believe that this action _ r-y p ^ ___ in Indo-i^hina is a prelude to a Japanese attack on Siberia. ADD LEAD 'I Japanese Ambassador Numura paid a visit to the State ion Department this afternoon and had half as hour»« conversati with Acting Secretary^Welles. When he left, the Acting Secretary said there v^ould be no statement on the Japanese Ambassador’s visit. Numura himself said that he hoped thereNtH^e^TBOFe-and A ^ "om ■01^friendl^^ feelingi betv»een Japsin and the United States. But here’s the grapevine report from l^ashington. §§r=*^vernTn€nt'tycoon* predict, unofficially, that Japanese A dominance over all French Indo-China will mean no more appeasement of Tokyo by the D.S. a spite of Japanese aggressions in the Far East, PresidenfcBoosevelt and his government have kept a conciliatory attitude, allol^ed oil and other supplies to go to Japan, done nothing concrete to hamper the Nipponese war lords. But, say high officials ^ the government tonight, in this Indo-China and Thailand business, the Nipponese will be going too far. In London tonight it is pointed out that if all Japanese assets in the Sxji British Empire and the United States were sterilized, they would no longer be able to get any imports ^pp ij : ap _ 2 at all for the simple reason that they couldn’t pay for them, They couldn’t^get cotton from India, or wool fronkustralia. and they couldn't sell silk to the Onited States any longer. ‘iil 11 ’‘ WAR The Red armies of Russia have slov.ed down the r^azi blitzkrieg. We We heard this before, but hitherto the claim has come from Moscow. Tonight it comes from Berlin.^^ThTwalir^aHilt" that terrific battles around Smolensk and to the southwest of Novgorad, have put the brakes on the progress of the panzer attacki This has a curious ring in our ears, as we recall that only two days ago the wazis claimed they had smashed w? the Soviet defenses, broken down their communication system, and th.at in short, there no longer was a cohesive, coordinated Russian army. Tonight we notice again the traces of the hand of Hitler himself in the communiques of the German high command. For instance, the Nazis tonight say that the Soviets are throwing enormous reserves into the battle. Last week the German high command declared that the Reds had already throv/n in their last reserves. Then again tonight they announce that Stalinas generals are bringing up huge reinforcements for a great battle that is raging between joq^JLxJtix the Luga River and Lake Ilmen, where the Germans are pushing^aStr^c^ iMovgored^ th Nazis claimed to have captured as long as ten days ago. Tonight WAR - 2 they announce officially that they^« still fighting for it. So one fact seems to be clear in all this welter of ^XKIBgxiui propoganda and confusion:- The second phase of the blitzkrieg on Russia is qq I going so v.ell. A French military expert at Vichy, after analyzing both German and Russian reports, found that one fierce battle was raging far to the west of Smolensk. H«%=aEFasi^hat the Russians, after letting the advance guard of the panzer columns go through, have cut the Nazi communication lines. HoVfever, it seems definite that in the north, the Germans and the Finns are pushing ahead, north of Lake Ladoga.^!fhey are on the verge of cutting the railroad line from Leningrad to Smolensk in the north, thus isolating the Red armies in the Arctic. '^outh in the Ukraine, the Reds are falling back from Jitoniar, withdrawing to a new line of defenses around Kiev, ARMif The Military Co^nlttee of the House of Representatives will support General Marshall, Chief of Staff of Uncle Sam's Army. It will report in favor of a resolution for a proclamation by Congress of a national emergency^ .^-u^hartr tl«» the Army mill to to hdng on "to 'th.6 men now in service. ^We may take this as positive since it comes from Congressman May of Kentucky, Chairman of the Military Affairs Committee of the H<^use. He made this announcement after his Committee had heard secret testimony from the Chief of Staff, and Chairman May explained in these wordsV InQUOTS: "The international situation is more serious than the general public understands and rapidly is getting still more so." ^nCTOTS. To that extent Chairman May authorized the correspondents to quote him. fie added that a majority of his Committee was now ready to report the resolution to the full House. Republican Congressman ^cha^^r of Michigan, who is no New Deal partisan, said that General Marshall’s testimony had convinced him that most serious consideration must be given to the Armyts request for extentioh of the period of service. ^ . 2 liaturally, we don’t know what General Marshall told thos6 Congressmen while the ConBiittee was in executive session* The utmost secrec^^wa^ enTorcedy^rwnd that part of the testimony given by the ^hlef of Staff, but part of what he told thwm was made public. Among other things, he said the Army at present was being hampered, stymied he called it, because Congress had forbidden the sending of troops to Trinidad, Iceland and other similar defense points. There are, at present, twelve hundred National Guardsmen at Trinidad, but they need to be reenforced. Uncle Sam hasn’t enough shipping to send selective service men to such outposts as Trinidad and also to bring them back wlllmHWk when their year of service expires. The General went on to say that the A-pmy chiefs have had a difficult Job building up the Apmy we now have and providing shelter for it. Every move they have made has been examined, analyzed and criticized, and he added that it is exceedingly difficult to build up an army under such circumstances. Then he spoke about the petitions that Congressmen have ''T*| army - 3 •eceived from individual enlisted men, protesting against being compelled to serve more than a year. iigi uggmiw, inrlTtddDg Senators l^heeler of Montana and Taft of Ohio, said thqr had received many such petitions from men who want to be^:^»^out of the Array. 1 The Chief of Staff declared that this kind of activity was nothing cLd<Lef/^ short of sabotage. But he these men have been led into doing this by agitators. He himself has received a huge lot of mail on the subject, including two hundred and forty-one unfavorable letters. Most of these, he declared, shewed^T-—*---?^ lu German signatures, used the same language and typical German-Americai Bund phrases and Christian Front expressions. Many of the. came from places inhabited largely by people of German ancestry, and many of them contained strong langugge against the President and the Chief of Staff. With all this racket going on in the army. said Marshall, it is difficult to maintain morale. And he added that if Congress tried to depend upon voluntary enlistment with bounties, to keep the army up required strength, it would be a colossal OIL H’ ^'..r u m I-’! 7/.xV Nine of the biggest oil companies in American will club together in building that seventy million dollar pipeline from Texas. When it’s completed, two hundted and fifty thousand barrels of crude oil will pass through thos pipes every day from the petroleum fields of Texas to the east coast. The building of that pipeline was formally approved yesterday by Secretary Ickes, as Defense Coordinator of Oil. The nine companies will establish a subsidiary to ioxft build and ma.intain the line. And Secretary Ickes has promised to ask the Priorities Board to release the materials necessary to build it. ^t will take eight months to finish it. gADia The American i>Jevtspaper Publishers today defied the Federal Communications Commission. The F.C.C. had ordered a hearing to decide whether to prohibit nev/spapers from owning radio stations. The Commission had summoned witnesses to appear and give testimony. Four of those witnesses who were subpoened A positively will not appear. S© said Elisha Hanson, general counsel of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Hanson explained that the F.C.C. has no authority to subpoena witnesses. The witnesses who will not appear are the business manager of the NEW YORK SDN, the Publisher of the NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE BANNER, the publisher of EDITOR AND PUBLISHER, and the director of the BUREAU OF ADVERTISING OF TEE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION. Thi s^ww i>w of the issues ve in Washington. ^f=^Mi^'malJt.e»-,y^radio and press are united, More than a hundred witnesses have been summoned b nnlv Lwwywr. Hanson but will obey. Not oniy^w»wy ^ heard, not all of them Lawyer ThomasD. Thacher, Counsel for tb* Newspaper Badio Committee, claimed that the Commission had no legal right to hold this hearing. RADIO , 2 Chairman Fly cut them short, said he did not want to hear any arguments,^peremptorily forbade the discussing of the Commission's power. Bounselor Hanson then reminded the Commission that the Commission's own general counsel had told the Commissioners years ago that they had no such authority. Since then the United States Court of Appeals made the same decision. On top of that, the Supreme <^ourt of the United States declared that Congress had not given the Commission any supervisory control of programs. of business management, or of policy. HRNDEr.SQN 5 ^ Down in Washington there was a merry little run-in today between Senator Tom Uonnally of Texas and Leon Henderson, K b I h I Administrator of Price Control, henderson was a witness before the Senate Committee Investigating Defense. Connally asked Henderson whether he had fixed prices on automobiles, electric refrigerators or shoes. Henderson replied that he had not yet done it for electric refrigerators but he was going to. The Senator then asked whether his present system of price-fixing was not just a polite system of blackmail. Henderson replied it was a much deeper thing than that. Then said the Senator from Texas, OSQTE: "You ain't going to fix prices on refrigerators, you Just think you are, but you're not.” UNt^UOTE. To which nenderson replied, and-ag*iO'^:2ee$ii "I*U lay you a little bet on that." c the" ears and he wanted to know That set the Senator by the ina to do it whether Congress gave him whether Henderson was going to authority or not. To that Henderson replied that he had the authority now, tha t he had the same powers as those of Bernard r HEi^DEhSOiN _ 2 Baruch during the last war, powers which had never been Knudsen then r evealed the fact that the O.P.M. and the questioned throughout the two Senate investigations. Connally then used these words:- ^You may have the authority but if you have you*ve got more power than any other man in the United States including the President. You have the power to destroy our economy or maintain it." The Senator then remarked to Henderson, "If you did not know so much I wouldn’t he afraid of you. But," he added, "you are so darn smart and know so much that you’ve become a dangerous figure, a threat." While this was going on. Director Knudsen of the Office of Production ilanagement, was telling reporters that Henderson hadn’t consulted him about the proposed fifty per cent | cut in the production of automobiles. Knudsen said that if production is cut that much, there will be a lot of people walking the streets. He prophesied that we’ll have to go about It the automobile industry reducing produc^gradually and going ahead with defense work meanwhile. gEND£RSOi^< - 3 Opacs, that’s the Office of Price Administration and Civilian 9^ Supply> were at loggerheads.^oth agencies have asked the White House to straighten out that little dispute. ^"■!i il !i' Hi M Ml'-i 1 A \\'H 'ii El m iiHI II “N