Word: pacts
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Early last week foreign correspondents in London, Moscow and Paris reported that the Anglo-Soviet pact was just about ready for signing. Late last week Prime Minister Chamberlain discussed it fully in a foreign affairs debate in the House of Commons. These sensational developments, however, were made somewhat less exciting by the fact that the pact had been reported ready for signing at least a dozen times before. Indeed, to detached observers the proceedings appeared less like diplomatic negotiations than like the scene in Hellzapoppin, in which a young man promises to escape from a strait jacket in five seconds...
...that Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax had helped him to compose the letter. In Rome, Fascism's mouthpiece, Virginio Gayda, dutifully echoed this view, took huffy exception to the Commander's reflections on the fighting qualities of the Italians, accused King-Hall of compromising the Anglo-Italian pact of 1938. But Editor Gayda could produce nothing to equal the sourball indignation of Goebbels, who sneered...
...Stimson, Secretary of State. He descended the long flight of steps, stalked across the street, entered the White House offices where he was closeted with President Herbert Hoover. Three days later a U. S. note went out to call Japan's attention to the Kellogg-Briand Peace pact. A copy of the note went to the other signatories of the Nine-Power Treaty in order to invite them to cooperate in putting pressure on Japan...
Last week readers of Pravda were treated to this joke in a front-page spread of Comrade Zhdanov's "personal opinion" that the Anglo-Soviet pact negotiations are deadlocked, that France and Britain are deliberately dragging them out in order to have an excuse for making a pact with Germany. Wrote Tovarich Zhdanov archly: Some friends disagree. One friend who obviously did not disagree was "Dear Friend" Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili Stalin, who took this typical way of prodding on the plodding powwows...
...specific pledges by Britain and France not to make a separate peace during war, leave Russia holding the bag. Sole outstanding issue left to quibble over was Russia's demand that the Baltic States also be guaranteed against a change of internal regime, i. e. Nazification. If the pact reports proved true and the Anglo-Russian Pact is at last to be signed, it could mean just one thing: this time Britain is in a fighting mood...