THE PEACE IN PREPARATION
. . . THE PEACE IN PREPARATION . . . THE approach of the world's first peacetime Christmas in seven years found the Foreign Ministers of the Big Three struggling behind locked and guarded doors in...
...Meanwhile, four-power occupation of Germany continued to produce tension, bitterness, and extreme hardship...
...The President defended U. S. policy in China thus far, pointing out that our marines were there to help with the evacuation of conquered Japanese troops...
...The Soviets, long jealous of British and American petroleum possessions in the Middle East, seem determined to get their share of the loot...
...Pai Chung-hsi, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's deputy chief of staff, last week proposed a modern war machine for China, including compulsory military training and establishment of military schools...
...Britain's House of Commons voted, 345 to 98...
...President Truman called urgently for prompt unification of China, the first step to be an immediate truce between the Communists and the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek...
...Objective of the new program is to get Germany back on her feet economically by 1948...
...Reports from London disclosed that France and Britain have agreed to withdraw their troops from troubled Syria and Lebanon and to align closely their future policy in the Middle East...
...Rapid progress toward the democratization of Japan continued this week...
...Gen...
...Meanwhile, prosecution of the war criminals continues in Nuernberg, with U. S. officials fighting to prevent the trial from bogging down in a legal wrangle that might last for six more months...
...in favor of accepting conditions of a $4,400,000,000 loan from the U. S. Foreign Minister Bevin asserted that the conditions left many Britons with the "discomfort" of just coming from a money lender's office...
...An Associated Press dispatch last week said that "the documentary evidence itself seems endless...
...Washington dispatches indicated this week that the U. S. Government may be heading toward a definite break with Franco Spain...
...See Page 12...
...It is an error," he said, "to have adopted at the Central Control Commission an attitude of obstruction, as if we wanted to revenge our exclusion from Potsdam by obstruction at Berlin...
...Molotov, Bevin, and Byrnes...
...Truman's statement came as he dispatched Gen...
...The German standard of living would not be allowed to exceed that of its European neighbors, under the State Department plan, but neither would the Reich be reduced, officials emphasized, "to a nation of foresters and goat-herders," as advocated by the revenge school in Allied nations...
...A Soviet-supported revolt in the northern province of Azerbaijan led this week to a Moscow announcement that a separate provincial government had been established there, presumably under the protection of Russia...
...Leon Blum, leader of the French Socialists, this week denounced official French policy toward Germany...
...A group of 34 U. S. Senators appealed to President Truman this week to launch a program, including creation of an independent U. S. relief mission, to relieve immediately "the appalling famine in Germany and Austria...
...THE PEACE IN PREPARATION . . . THE approach of the world's first peacetime Christmas in seven years found the Foreign Ministers of the Big Three struggling behind locked and guarded doors in Moscow for at least partial agreement on some of the basic issues which have divided the victorious Powers since they crushed their common enemy...
...The MaeArthur statement included a powerful indictment against the Shinto cult which combines the worship of nature and ancestors with heavy doses of jingoism and imperialism...
...Douglas Mac-Arthur issued a sweeping decree designed to destroy the militaristic doctrines of Shinto and provide for separation of church and" state...
...The unrecognized Indonesian Republic bitterly denounced a Dutch plan to dispatch an expeditionary force from Holland equipped with American arms and trained in American camps...
...After the grim evidence of the past week, testimony about mass death has become so commonplace that the mind refuses to assimilate it...
...Commons also voted, 314 to 50, to ratify the Bretton Woods monetary agreement...
...One of the most urgent problems tossed in the lap of the- Foreign Minister was that of oil-rich, unhappy Iran, long a pawn in the imperialist conflicts of the Great Powers...
...Officials in Washington described the plan as a "delayed process of reconstruction" in the Reich to give a head start to the European nations that Germany overran and despoiled...
...Accurate news from Java became daily more difficult to obtain as the British high command clamped wartime secrecy on troop movements and communications as a prelude to full-scale military operations against Indonesian freedom forces...
...Such aid will be necessary to "prevent disease and unrest" in the conquered Reich, a State Department statement said...
...It predicted extreme distress in Germany this Winter, but called for launching a slow recovery in the Spring...
...So bad have conditions become that Secretary of State Byrnes last week called for a new economic policy for Germany which calls on the Allied Powers to finance a program of German imports over the next two years...
...It did become known, however, that the British destroyed an entire village by fire in retaliation against snipers...
...Britain was becoming more and more involved in the bloody suppression of the Indonesians as the Labor Government in London continued to defy pressure from its own ranks for a less brutal policy...
...Strife In The Orient '. Equally serious was the grim situation in Indonesia •where Dutch and British imperial forces continued to blast the native independence movement...
...1. The Iranian Government appealed to the Big Three last week to discuss the Iranian problem at the Moscow conference and called for an immediate withdrawal of their troops, but there was no comment from the Messrs...
...The defendants, 21 top-ranking Nazis, are determined, however, to hold out for their right to call witnesses in their defense...
...As Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov played host to Britain's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, the world's danger zones continued to boil over with new and bitter strife...
...His return, via Paris, came at the same time that the French Foreign Office announced that the U. S. and Britain have been asked to consult with France on a diplomatic rupture with Franco...
...Principal objection came from the British who have 300,000,000 million natives within their empire...
...The pact was drawn last Summer, but only half a dozen nations have bothered to ratify thus far...
...He was emphatic in making it clear that American aid for Chiang's regime "will not extend to U. S. military intervention to influence the course of anv Chinese internal strife...
...Gen...
...Helping The Little Man Purpose of the new directive, MaeArthur explained, is 1) to free the Japanese people from the compulsion to believe in the religion officially designated by the state, 2) to lift from the people the burden of supporting the cult which "has contributed to their war guilt, defeat, suffering, privation, and present deplorable condition," 3) to prevent renewed perversion of Shinto beliefs to the uses of aggressors, and 4) to help the little man build a new Japan dedicated to peace and democracy...
...Ambassador Norman Armour is returning from Madrid, and State Department officials say no plans have been made to replace him...
...Japan contributed other front-page news this week when Prince Fuminaro Konoye, three times premier of Japan, committed suicide after having been named for trial as a war criminal...
...World News Notes: A report prepared by a special subcommittee of the United Nations Preparatory Commission rejects the plea of the Philippine Islands that peoples administered by trusteeships be given a voice in expressing their grievances before the UNO...
...Meanwhile, new moves to end the costly civil war in China were in the making this week...
...American prosecutors in Germany this week called on the International Military Tribunal to convict as war criminals 600,000 members of the Nazi leadership corps, which was described as "the brain, backbone, and directing arm of the Nazi Party...
...The President backed his demand with outright economic pressure, holding out the promise of credits and loans to China if political unity is achieved...
...The de Gaulle regime has stubbornly refused to permit modification of the original occupation scheme for Germany...
...George C. Marshall to China as special Presidential representative with the rank of ambassador...
...They have refused an Anglo-American proposal that all three Powers withdraw their military forces from Iran by Jan...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 51
