"Aid" for Japan

Out of Philadelphia last week, without the cargo she had come to fetch for the Emperor of Japan, steamed the Azuma Maru. The cargo which the neat little Japanese freighter sailed without was oil.

The Azuma Maru's hoped-for cargo was held up by one U.S. citizen's ire. Edward Jobbins, who manages the Wilson-Martin division of Wilson & Co., Inc. (meats) and is busy as a bee making fatty acids for the manufacture of various articles of defense, read in his Philadelphia paper one morning that the Azuma Maru had arrived in port to load lubricating oil. Mr. Jobbins hit the ceiling. He failed to see why, when the East Coast was facing a shortage of petroleum products--because oil-carrying tankers had been transferred to the British--an Axis power should be allowed to make the shortage shorter. He burnt up the wires to the President, to Harold Ickes, Oil Coordinator, to every responsible person he could think of.

Terrible Harold Ickes, apparently unaware of the Azuma Maru until that very moment, promptly responded. With no law at all on his side but with the might of the Treasury Department and the Coast Guard and the cooperation of the oil companies, he stopped the Azuma Maru from taking on a single barrel of oil. A few days later, so that next time there would be a law, President Roosevelt put all U.S. petroleum products under export control, forbade shipments from Atlantic ports to any place except the Western Hemisphere, the British Empire and Egypt.

Still a puzzle to many a U.S. citizen like Mr. Jobbins was an addendum to the White House statement, which declared: "Further restrictions of shipments of petroleum from the Gulf or Pacific ports of the U.S. is not contemplated." This made sense so far as U.S. shortage was concerned--only the East Coast has a shortage, because of transportation bottlenecks. But in the first three months of this year approximately 3,600,000 barrels of petroleum products (but no high octane aviation gas) were shipped from the U.S. to Japan. And many people wanted to know: Why help China with one hand and Japan, China's enemy, with the other?

Last week the Foreign Policy Association backed up the Administration's stand, declared: "Tokyo has been able to force Britain and the U.S. to sell oil by threatening to strike at the East Indies if an embargo is applied. Washington and London agree on the wisdom of propitiating the Japanese by furnishing them with sufficient oil to meet or more than meet their needs."

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