Word: hainan
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...advantage of the demoralization after Munich to step quietly south and seize Canton, at the back door of British Hong Kong. Stepping just as quietly, last week she took advantage of the confusion of the Spanish war's climax, went still farther south and occupied the island of Hainan, at the front door of French Indo-China...
...from France and Britain, this fertile and strategic patch of about 13,500 square miles. Once more the Anti-Comintern bloc was up to its clever trick of kicking the democracies in the pants when they were worried about troubles elsewhere. The Japanese war office hissed assurances that the Hainan occupation was purely a military operation to keep the Chinese from shipping arms to South China. The Japanese said they would withdraw when there was no further military necessity for their presence. Every government in the world knew they would not if they could help...
...Hoihow, Hainan's chief port, is potentially a good harbor, and a naval base there would command the Indo-China coast, some 200 miles to the west. It sits across the British Singapore-Hong Kong line and might menace the line from the Philippines to Singapore, should the U. S. and Britain ever act in concert in the East. It gives Japan a better jumping off place toward the oil-rich Netherlands Indies than it has ever had before. The Japanese Empire now stretches 2,400 miles from its farthest northern to its farthest southern outposts...
Tokyo censors passed cables in which foreign correspondents guessed this meant the Japanese Navy will proceed to take Chinese Hainan Island adjacent to French Indo-China. Hainan lies uncomfortably close to the French naval base at Saigon and commands the route between British Hong Kong and British Singapore. Hainan in Japanese hands would be the sort of pistol Hitler pointed when he mobilized 1,500,000 Germans to solve the Sudeten problem without...
...disclosure followed a week after an announcement in the British House of Commons that France and Britain had sent a joint warning to Tokyo to keep hands off the big Chinese island of Hainan, 150 miles northeast of the Paracels and hard off the coast of China. Japanese occupation of either Hainan or the Paracels would place Japan within easy attacking distance of Indo-China, more important, would place her astride Britain's vital sea route between her strongly fortified colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore...