Word: siberians
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chinese, looking for subtle reasons for these Japanese moves, turned their eyes to the north. Reports came of new activity along the Siberian border. The Japs, they calculated, intended to turn their backs on China for a while to fight another war. The Chinese also looked to the south. The Japs, they calculated, intended to stab at China's soft underside through Yunnan and Kwangsi Provinces...
Then the Oregon traipsed back to the Pacific. She carried Marines to Peking during the Boxer rebellion, was on duty at the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, served as a World War I training ship, escorted transports for General William Sidney Graves's Siberian expedition in 1918. Decommissioned after World War I, she was supposed to become a Portland public monument (like the Constitution in Boston). But now her metal is too precious: she must die in a junk yard...
Japan's main targets are bound to be two: Vladivostok in the southeast, and the famed Trans-Siberian Railway, the long and vulnerable artery of Russian Asia (see map). Since Russia lost the shorter, more direct Chinese Eastern Railway through conquered Manchuria to Vladivostok, the Trans-Siberian has been the U.S.S.R.'s only land link with her Pacific port. And the Trans-Siberian is perilously open to attack: by land and air from northwestern Manchukuo, by land across the wide but easily passable Gobi (which, for all its fearsome reputation, is more like Nebraska and the Dakotas than...
...Japanese will probably be well pleased if they can storm Vladivostok by land, air and sea, slice up the Trans-Siberian, come to rest near Lake Baikal, retake the rich half of Sakhalin which they lost after winning it 17 years ago. Then they will have a sufficient barrier between Russia and Japanese Asia. They will have removed, at Vladivostok, an ever-present threat of Russian or U.S. air attack on Tokyo itself. Russian aid to China will be completely shut off, and Chiang Kai-shek's resistance may finally be smothered...
...items in this Siberian inventory will surprise U.S. readers more than the report of large oilfields in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. If true, the real defensibility of the Siberian bastion may well depend on those fields. For it is generally believed that 85% of Russia's oil is in the Caucasus fields; that if the Germans conquer this oil even the Siberian military, industrial and agricultural machine will break down...