Word: tientsin
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From Chinwangtao, the seaside resort just below the Great Wall, to Singapore, the big British naval base at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, the coast of Eastern Asia rumbled last week with warlike activity. At Tientsin Japanese soldiers tightened their two-weeks-old blockade on the British Concession; at Chefoo and Tsingtao Japanese officials sponsored anti-British demonstrations; at Shanghai British Ambassador to China Sir Archibald Clark Kerr was surrounded with a heavy guard after "terrorists" had threatened his life; the Japanese captured one Chinese port, closed another, attacked two more (Foochow, Wenchow); at Hong Kong British troops...
Admiral Harry E. Yarnell, commander-in-chief of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet, received the ultimatum on his flagship the cruiser Augusta, anchored off Chinwangtao, some 1,500 miles North, where he had gone after a brief inspection trip to Tientsin. He replied by 1) ordering the Pillsbury to remain, 2) dispatching another destroyer, the Pope, to the spot. The British seconded the U. S. by not only keeping the Thanet at Swatow but by sending the Scout to join her. Nothing happened to the ships, nor to any of the U. S. or British nationals ashore...
...Tientsin. Having backed down at Swatow, the Japanese military at Tientsin, where they claimed the British were harboring anti-Japanese terrorists (TIME, June 26), became ever bolder. Live wire encircled the British and French Concessions, had by week's end killed a cat and a coolie. As food got scarcer, 1,500 Britons within the area realized that for all practical purposes they were imprisoned. Those who tried to get in or out were stripped, searched, cuffed. The colony settled down to make the best of the situation. Unable to go to the British Country Club, outside the Concession...
...light of print in London, British ire rose. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, asked in Parliament what economic reprisals were planned, answered: "I do not think we have yet reached that stage." But the Prime Minister did refer to the "high-handed and intolerably insulting treatment of British subjects" in Tientsin and complained that the Japanese military had made the Tientsin incident a "pretext for far-reaching and quite inadmissible claims." The London Times cautiously recommended that the British Government at least look into the question of economic sanctions, and Conservative and Laborite M. P.'s joined in demanding firm...
Stripping British subjects in Tientsin or bayonetting Chinese irregulars in Shansi, the Japanese infantryman is backed up by an Air Force that has "Made in the U. S. A." on many an airplane, engine, propeller, parachute. This week the Department of Commerce published its latest figures on aeronautical exports to Japan: $1,665,389 for the first five months of 1939. Total to other countries (Britain the chief customer...