Word: mekong
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...between Thailand and French Indo-China ended last week. The victor was Japan. Nobody had asked Japan to mediate the quarrel, which had gone on intermittently in the swampy jungles along the Mekong River since October, but fortnight ago Tokyo offered its services. When the offer was not immediately accepted, Japan became insistent, threatening. Nipponese warlords insisted that, as "the most stabilizing power in the Far East," Japan alone had the right to settle Oriental differences. Under duress Vichy, then Thailand, accepted...
Guns popped on the Mekong River last week as the little brown men from Thailand and the little brown men from French Indo-China went to war. Thailand had demanded the return of a strip of territory along the Mekong River acquired by the French in 1893. To emphasize her claim she had mobilized her Army, said to number 100,000 men, her Air Force of 300-500 U. S. planes with inexperienced pilots, her Navy of four cruisers, one destroyer, four submarines and 21 torpedo boats. Vichy remained inactive. Elephant and bicycle forays into Cambodia went ignored. Last week...
Artillery on both sides of the Mekong poured shells into the mountains, jungle and straw-thatched villages on the other side. Thai planes raided the Indo-Chinese towns of Pak-sé, Suvarnakhet. French planes bombed the Thai towns of Prachinburi, Aranya. Military communiqués reported fierce engagements in the borderland forests, casualties mounting as high as 600 in a single clash. Both sides claimed victory, but after four days of fighting the French authorities admitted that their troops had retreated 50 miles, and Bangkok announced that the Thai flag had been raised over Cambodia...
...Thailand were to be attacked soon by Japan, it would probably be from the north and west, via French Indo-China.Thailand's northwestern frontier with Indo-China follows a fairly good military barrier, the Mekong River-except for a stretch of about 270 miles, where Indo-China has title to a narrow strip of territory south and east of the river. The area once belonged to Thailand. About the time Japan moved into Indo-China, Thailand decided to demand this strip of land, to close the gap in the barrier. Because she went to work on Indo-China...
...last week they had become pretty intense. There were small bombings and counter-bombings. The fighting was by no means a war, but it was an episode which somehow epitomized the tragic complications of the year of grace 1940. A no-account strip of precipitous jungle on the Mekong River had become a matter of world politics involving not only Thailand and France, but the Axis and Britain-and even the U. S., which may some day have to defend the Philippines...