War seemingly everywhere this February 23, 1941 – not only in Europe but Far East.
Events in the western theater of war and in the Far East continue to move with increasing intensity toward the impending show-down which will have its center in Hitler’s all-out attack on Britain. An interesting development of the tense situation in the Orient in an effort by Japan to allay British and American suspicions of her aims for expansion southward. Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka was quoted in the Tokyo newspaper Asahi as saying that “Japan has not taken any action in the Pacific or South Seas calculated to cause any feeling of unrest in the United States or Britain.”- Matsuoka also was reported to have declared that any increase in Japanese military forces in French Indo-China was aimed at Chungking, the Chinese capital which was resisting the Japanese invasion, and not at Britain’s great naval base of Singapore, some 600 miles to the southwest. Now when the foreign minister approaches the matter of Nippon’s concentration of troops and warships in and about this important French colony, he was getting at the heart of the subject.
The signs indicated that Japan was preparing to extend and consolidate her hold on that French territory, which afforded a powerful naval, air and military base about midway between Singapore and the Philippines, The Japanese charge made the day before that the authorities of that colony were plotting against Japan would provide excuse for military action. The way things looked on this day, Japan will get well set in, French Indo-China and then await developments in Europe. If Hitler was successful in his big attack on England, Japan would be in a strong position to pursue her expansionist program should she see fit. If Britain looked like the ultimate winner, and able to protect her Far Eastern interests, Japan still would have gained an invaluable base and storehouse of supplies from which it could be exceedingly difficult to oust her. The explosive Balkan situation continued to produce a great crop of rumors, none of which were very helpful in forecasting the trend of affairs.
One of the most important of these unconfirmed reports came from the Turkish official radio, which said the British were holding large forces in North Africa, ready to invade the Balkans through Greece. . ‘ . The radio concluded that this meant Britain either were planning to establish a Balkan front against the Germans, or was bent on saving her Greek ally from being forced into peace terms by the Germans.
And that’s just a small slice of what happened on this day of war, February 23, 1941 as reported by NBC’s Sunday Night Roundup.
