Breaking the Circle

WAR & PEACE

Last week Ambassador Clarence Gauss (rhymes with boss) sailed on the President Garfield from San Francisco, bound for Chungking. Like every U.S. Ambassador, like the members of the innumerable U.S. missions in Europe and Asia, his task had narrowed to one main aim: to prevent the Axis encirclement of the U.S.

The circle was tightening.

Ambassador Gauss, who smokes so constantly that he seems naked without a cigar, kept out of the limelight as usual. Unobtrusive, sharp-faced, medium-tall, grey-haired, he has been in the U.S. foreign service for 35 of his 54 years. When he was 19, a State Department clerk at $900 a year, Elihu Root had just become Secretary of State, John Hay's Open Door in China was a reality, and the Russo-Japanese war had made Japan a world power. When young Gauss became deputy consul general at Shanghai in 1907, Teddy Roosevelt was sending the U.S. Fleet round the world in a mighty demonstration of U.S. strength.

For 25 years Gauss served in China. Hard-boiled and short-spoken, he was not overpopular with U.S. citizens in Shanghai, where he was consul general--but he got things done. Working with Admiral Yarnell when the Japanese poured into Shanghai, he was known as a man who would not backtrack before the Japanese. When he emerged from his conferences over the administration of the International Settlement, attaches would pass word around that the consul general had won his point: "Gauss is boss."

Last week the Ambassador was returning to a vastly changed China. The Open Door was closed. Only by way of Burma could China reach the sea. Step by step the Japanese had moved southward to cut outside maritime communications with China. Last week, although the U.S. State Department still minimized the Russo-Japanese Pact, more & more officials were realizing the effectiveness of Axis grand strategy: to destroy the Anglo-American position in the world by isolating the U.S. Said Pundit Walter Lippmann, espousing this view: The issue of 1941 is "whether the United States, cut off from Asia, from Europe, from Africa, from South America, and from the British Isles, is to be left alone, entirely isolated, incompletely armed, and encircled by the worldwide totalitarian alliance."

Yet there were still breaks in the circle. Last week, as bespectacled Dr. Quo Tai-chi (Phi Beta Kappa, University of Pennsylvania '11) arrived in the U.S. from London, where he had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, en route to Chungking, where he will be China's new Foreign Minister, the U.S. moved to widen them:

> The U.S. signed a currency stabilization agreement with the Chinese, advancing $50,000,000 to support Chinese currency. When Japan joined the Axis last year, the U.S. countered with a $100,000,000 loan to China. But this will be a drop in the bucket compared to plans for China aid under the Lend-Lease Act.

> If Russia's overland aid to China stops as a result of the Russo-Japanese Pact, China's resistance will depend more than ever on the aid that the U.S. can ship across the Pacific. Last week Secretary Hull (who had previously minimized the Russo-Japanese Pact) let it be known that U.S.-Russian talks were getting nowhere, hinted at an end to attempts to appease Russia. Next day he talked with Lord Halifax and Australian Minister Richard Casey. Probable subject: U.S. use of Singapore--without which, in the event of war, U.S. communication with China and the Far East would be impossible.

> Ex-Ambassador Bullitt, speaking in behalf of the United China Relief drive, put the case for Chinese aid in the sharpest terms yet. "We have not yet been attacked by Germany, Italy and Japan for one reason and one reason only--they have not been able to get at us. . . . The Chinese have kept the Japanese so fully occupied that they have hesitated to add a sea war against the British or ourselves to their land war with China. . . . To help China is to help ourselves. They are fighting . . . on what is literally--in a strategic sense--our western front. . . . In self-defense, for our own preservation, whatever the consequences, we must back the British and the Chinese."

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