Present & Future Plans

To London for his first session as a top member of the Supreme Allied War Council went crinkle-eyed little Paul Reynaud, France's new more-action Premier, potential Clemenceau of World War II. Both his electorate and the British expected some sign of new energy from the Council. They got a formal communique: "[Both Governments] mutually undertake that during the present war they will neither negotiate nor conclude an armistice or treaty of peace except by mutual agreement. . . . They undertake to maintain after conclusion of peace a community of action for so long as may be necessary. . . ."

If this was futuristic, the Allies' concurrent actions were more in line with getting on with the war. Minister of Economic Warfare Ronald Hibbert Cross made public an Allied plan to buy up in advance all this year's exportable surpluses of crops as well as commodities in the Balkans, so that Germany shall not have them. This plan, talked of before, will take some doing.

At Aleppo, the French and British commanders met with Turkey's high command in long sessions at which they were reported to have mapped out, in minutest detail, plans for tri-power action in the event of Balkan invasion by Germany or a Caucasian war with Russia. The Balkans buzzed with a report (discounted in London and Paris) that Turkey had promised the Allies free passage through the Dardanelles for war purposes and use of her harbors at Trebizond, Samsun and Sinope for a blockade of the Black Sea.

To Paris sped General Maxime Weygand, Commander of French forces in the Near East, to report to Premier Reynaud.

By waging economic war with more ruthless disregard for neutral rights and international law, the Allies may offend neutrals obliquely without bringing them into the war. Last week's detention of two Russian freighters in the Far East was strong Allied provocation of Red Russia, but was scarcely calculated to lead to hostilities. Even if it should, the new Allied attitude seemed to be that they did not care.

First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, in his weekend radioration, expressed this attitude neatly: "It is no part of our policy to seek a war with Russia." And in the next breath: "The Soviet Government, in their onslaught against the heroic Finns, have exposed to the whole world the ravages which Communism makes upon the fibre of any nation which falls a victim to that deadly mental and moral disease. This exposure of the Russian Army and Russian Air Force has astonished the world and has rightly heartened all the States that dwell upon the Russian border."

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