RUSSIA-JAPAN: Portents

A second front last week had become more than a race against Hitler's European armies. It had become a race to see who would open one first—the U.S. and Britain to aid Russia, or Japan to help Germany. From the Pacific came portents indicating that Japan, with 1,000,000 men already lined up in Manchukuo, was poised for a blow against Siberia.

> Japan had moved into the Aleutians, flanking Soviet Kamchatka and sitting athwart one important U.S.-Russian communication line.

> The U.S.S.R. openly accused a Japanese submarine of torpedoing the 4,761-ton Russian freighter Angarstroi, which sank 32 miles off the Japanese coast.

Significant of new tension in Soviet-Japanese relations was the fact that Russia had waited since May 1, when the Angarstroi was sunk, to bring into the open its charge against Japan, with whom it has a year-old Neutrality Pact. If things were going peacefully, Russia would be unlikely to engage in public recrimination. Significant, too, was the fact that through the strict Soviet censorship last week came this sentence in a dispatch from Walter Kerr of the New York Herald Tribune: "The Soviet Union has done everything possible under the circumstances to fulfill its obligations under the Pact . . . [but Russia] has never failed to make clear that it believed the Japanese attack [on the U.S. and Britain] was aggressive and treacherous."