AT SEA: In the Far East

Red Russia's Ambassador to Great Britain, amiable little Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, trotted around to No. 9 Downing Street one day last week to reiterate the Soviet Union's first concrete complaint against British war behavior. On Jan. 13, British warships off Formosa stopped the Red freighter Selenga, en route from a Chinese port to Vladivostok with a cargo of tin, antimony and wolframite (tungsten ore). They took the Selenga clear to Hong Kong for examination, on the suspicion that the metals were destined for Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Last week the Selenga and her cargo were still detained at Hong Kong, when in came the Vladimir Mayakovsky, also under British escort. She had 4,000 tons of U. S. copper and a lot of molybdenite aboard, cleared from Manzanillo on Mexico's west coast and San Pedro, Calif. She, too, was bound for Vladivostok. Her cargo, too, was suspect as contraband for Germany.

Lord Halifax gave Ambassador Maisky no satisfaction, despite the latter's oath that the cargoes were entirely for Soviet consumption, not reexport to Germany, and his legal point that Russia's ships are State-owned, hence not subject to seizure. Presently it was announced that British officials at Hong Kong had turned both Red freighters over to their allies, the French, who were taking them to a port in Indo-China for further scrutiny. Report was that the officers & crew of the Selenga, refusing to submit, were placed under arrest. It seemed a cinch that neither Russia nor Germany would soon receive those particular tons of copper, tin, antimony, wolframite, molybdenite.

The seizure of these Red ships constituted new affronts direct to Germany's big, silent partner, and made good the promise of Minister of Economic Warfare Ronald Cross to the House of Commons that due watch would be kept on Germany's economic back door through Asia (TIME, March 11).

So vast are the Orient oceans, so wide the trade routes leading over them to Dairen and Vladivostok, that any airtight blockade of Germany's Asian door is unthinkable. The distance across Siberia (6,000 miles), plus the fact that the Reds are hustling to build electrical, steel and shipbuilding industries in Eastern Siberia, gave Mr. Maisky's oath a ring of honesty.

Nevertheless there are stories afloat that German naval technicians have lately visited Russian submarine bases in the Komandorskie Islands off Kamchatka, and at Possiet (Whale) Bay just southwest of Vladivostok. At the latter place, German military police are reported in full charge, fitting the harbor as a raiding base for German submarines transported in pieces over the Trans-Siberian and assembled on Asia's eastern edge.