 The National Broadcasting Company and its affiliated stations present the Pacific Story. In the mounting fury of the world conflict, events in the Pacific are taking on ever greater importance. Here is the story of the Pacific and the millions of people who live around this greatest sea. The drama of the peoples whose destiny is at stake in the Pacific War. Here is the tale of the war in the Pacific and its meaning to us and to the generations to come. The Pacific Story comes to you tonight from Hollywood in San Francisco as another public service with drama of the past and present and commentary by Dr. Harold H. Fisher, professor of history at Stanford University and authority on Russia. The case of Russia versus Japan. Plant the Japanese flag on the Urales. This is Yosuke Matsuoka. I will plant the Japanese flag on the Urales. The Ural Mountains are 3,000 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. In this statement, a former foreign minister of Japan is contained the gist of the Japanese attitude toward Russia in the Far East. Russian Russians face the Japanese in the Far East. A million Japanese face the Russians. The frontiers bristle with bayonets and rifles and big guns. Tanks and guns rumble behind the deeply entrenched fortifications. I've heard the Russians have 3,000 aeroplanes and over 2,000 armored vehicles out there. They say Russia's built 4,000 blockhouses along the Soviet Manchurian border. Well, they ain't fighting, are they? Why ain't they? It says here in this paper that it looks like the Russians and the Japs got a secret deal to divide Asia between them. The Japs get one part and the Reds the other and the Americans will hold the bag as usual. All right, Mr. Let's look at the record. Both Russia and Japan have made their positions clear. Our policy is to eliminate Russia from Asia. The land east of the Urals is Asia. Siberia is the place for the expansion of a Japanese culture. In this north-eastern corner of Asia, the influence of Japan must become supreme. To this the Russians have replied. Through the land east of the Urals is Asia. But also it is Russia. There is Russia in Europe and there is Russia in Asia. But it is all one great Soviet Union of peoples. And no one shall cut off a part of the living body of Russia. The conflict between Russia and Japan is long-standing. It began in the friction between nations of the two contenders more than a century ago in the Kuril Islands and on Fokkelin Island. From there it spread to the mainland. Eventually, Baron Rosen, the Russian minister in Tokyo, was in discussions with Marquisito, prime minister of Japan. We are frankly alarmed, Baron Rosen, at Russia's failure to withdraw her military forces from Manchuria. Our troops were moved into Manchuria to suppress the boxers, Marquisito. That has been accomplished for some time now. Russia has no territorial designs on Manchuria. You must know, Baron Rosen, that Japan is determined to extend authority over part of the continent of Asia. Our population can no longer be accommodated on our islands. Which part of Russia is Japan thinking of, Marquisito? Korea. Korea? Yes, preferably the northern part. The other parts of Korea are so densely populated that there would be no room for Japanese settlements. Japan recognizes, of course, that Russia has claims on the parts of Korea joining her. It would be to our mutual advantage, Baron Rosen, to come to an agreement about our spheres of influence in this region. We suggest that Russia keep the northeastern part of Korea and that Japan take the southwestern part. I shall be happy to communicate your suggestion to my Emperor, Marquisito. There is just this to add, Baron Rosen. Japan has come to the decision that we must amably divide the eastern shore of the Pacific with Russia. If it is impossible to reach such an agreement with Russia, we must then form an alliance with some other nation to halt Russia's expansion in the Pacific. To which other nation does Marquisito refer? To England, perhaps? Of course, Japan would much prefer to reach an understanding with Russia. Baron Rosen saw the seriousness of the situation. He saw that Russian interest in Korea was a matter of protecting Russia's position in Manchuria. He saw also that Japan's interest in Korea was a matter of life and death. He communicated with his government in St. Petersburg. You see, Your Majesty, Baron Rosen is of the opinion that nothing can be gained by making an enemy of Japan. Russia cannot be intimidated by Japan, Mr. Lemstow. I have here a communication from Colonel Bogak, our military attaché in Tokyo. He reports that soon the Japanese army will be dangerous. He also points out that if we do not come to an understanding with Japan, she will make an ally of England. Yes, England. But we have friends too. Do you remember how the German Kaiser saluted me? The Admiral of the Atlantic, he said, greets the Admiral of the Pacific. Baron Rosen reports that the population of Japan is growing at an enormous rate and that the Japanese seem to have fierce fighting qualities. Have the kindness to remember that we have commanded our vice-roy to fulfill the historic mission of establishing Russian supremacy on the shores of the Pacific? Yes, Your Majesty. Russia will never permit Japan to establish herself in Korea? Yes, Your Majesty. Recall Baron Rosen. We must have a stronger man in Tokyo. Yes, Your Majesty. I have been informed by General Kurupotkin that the Japanese are unprepared. They're afraid, and they are only bluffing. In 1901, Marquis Ito personally went to St. Petersburg. He was received coldly. He went on to London and concluded an alliance with Great Britain. From this moment it was only a matter of time until the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. Japan attacks Russia at Port Arthur, extra. Japan attacks with an author, surrenders to Japanese, extra. Port Arthur, away from Baltic to Japan, extra. Togo destroys Korea at Portsmouth, extra. Peace treaty signed. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan, and in the peace treaty that followed were sown the seeds of future discord. Russia and Japan became suspicious partners, dividing Manchuria and Mongolia into spheres of influence. Besides, the Japanese demanded and got fishing privileges in the Russian waters around Kamchatka, and these rights they exploited without regard for conservation. The Japanese rode high and handsome in the Russian fisheries for years. Then came the revolution in Russia. The Soviets repudiated the Tsarist fishing treaties, and bitter conflict followed. Then in 1925, Japan recognized the Soviet Union, and the Soviets recognized Japan's old fishing privileges, and then more friction developed. Captain Yaro! Captain Yaro! Yes, Lieutenant? There are enemies there on the port bow. There is a fishing boat. And where? The fog is so thick. Right over there, in that direction. There. There. See it? Yes. I can just see the outline. That is a Japanese fishing steamer. They are poaching here in Siberian waters. Hold speed ahead. Hold speed ahead. See us. They know we are a Soviet patrol boat. They are trying to lose us in the fog. Men, all guns. Men, all guns! All guns! All guns! Wound the boat to ray two. Yes, sir. Oh-ho! You're trying to get away, Captain. All guns fired. All guns fired! Any members of the Japanese crew of the fishing boat Fumimaru were killed. Japan protested. Soviet Russia paid an indemnity, but money could not save this wound. Revenge was necessary. All right. Put them all below decks. All of them. Get down to your commander. Get down there, Mo. Ozuki, bring that Russian up here. Yes, sir. Get him up this way. The commander wishes to speak with you. Well, what right are you taking us aboard this ship? You know that you are in Japanese waters? I went to the rescue of one of our Russian ships wrecked on the Kurios. How many men do you have? On both ships, 285. Why are you taking us prisoner? We are holding you for the protection as well as the control of the men on your ships. Take him below, Ozuki. Reprisal brought counter-reprisal. The Soviet authorities seized the Japanese salmon boat, charging that it was fishing inside the three-mile limit. In turn, the Japanese warship Tachikazi took the Soviet patrol boat, took its captain aboard, and conducted its own inquiry. We have established the fact that the point where the seizure of the Japanese vessel was affected was outside Soviet territorial waters. The Japanese salmon boat never was within the three-mile limit. This was the statement of Japanese Admiral Azmuni. But just the same, the Russians took vigorous action against the Japanese operator of the salmon boat. It is the order of this court that you, Harold Katsui, be fined 300 yen, and that your nets and other equipment valued at 3,000 yen be confiscated. Conflict after conflict. Bitterness developed not only as a result of poaching, but also as a result of the methods of fishing. In addition to establishing canneries ashore on Russian territory, the Japanese established floating canneries just outside the territorial waters of Kamchatka. Actually, they are screening the salmon from our shore. Keeping the salmon away? Yes, sir. They have spread hundreds of miles of nets from one fishing vessel to another. They are intercepting the salmon before they get to our shore. Is there nothing we can do about this? There are Japanese canneries here on the shore of Kamchatka. The nets must keep the salmon away from them also. The Japanese who spread their nets from the floating canneries are competitors of the Japanese canneries here on shore. Well, yes. They are ruining our fisheries here. The fish they catch in their nets are younger and younger. They do not have a chance to grow up and reproduce. What can we do? We have no jurisdiction over what the Japanese do beyond the three-mile limit. The Japanese government stepped in and forced a merger of the shore canneries and the floating canneries. This solved the problem for the Japanese. But for the Russians... This means that the Japanese control the salmon afloat as well as the shore, and we get only the few fish that happen to get through their screen of nets. While Russia and Japan have been at loggerheads over fishing rights these many years, they have also been in conflict over their spheres of influence on the mainland of Asia. In 1911, a mission from Outer Mongolia went to St. Petersburg. We have come to ask Russia for help. Do we understand that you of Outer Mongolia have declared your independence from China? Yes. All China is rising against the Manchus in Peking. We of Outer Mongolia have proclaimed our own Mongolian ruler. Then your leader is one of your own people of Outer Mongolia? Yes. We ask the protection of Russia against China. We are Mongols, not Chinese. We have watched your revolt and we will help you retain your freedom. Russia spread her wings over Outer Mongolia. Bad feeling, friction and open clashes resulted. Violent outbreaks occurred between the Japanese and the Red Partisans. The Japanese said... The Anguaro Saxon Natives have closed their doors to the Japanese. Therefore, we must seek some other outlet for our growing population. Japan must have Siberia. First, we will develop Siberia's natural resources. Then we will send settlers. At last, after bloodshed and massacre, the Japanese cleared out of Siberia. But they did not forget. And now the chess moves on the mainland of Asia came one after another. The Japanese struck at Mukden and almost overnight took all of Manchuria. Then Russia promised to defend the people's government of Outer Mongolia in case of attack. Japan pondered this move. Russia's support of the people's government of Outer Mongolia is a threat to the peace in East Asia and to the security of Japan. Do you mean that Outer Mongolia might someday become part of the USSR? That is the real danger. And that would mean that Russian control would extend down to the frontier of Inner Mongolia. Inner Mongolia? Inner Mongolia is our sphere of interest. And if Russia moves down through Outer Mongolia to that frontier, there is a real danger that Russia may try to penetrate into Inner Mongolia. The stage was rapidly being set for a head-on collision in the interior of Asia. The frontiers between the Russian spheres and the Japanese spheres bristled with arms. Friction grew into open clashes. By 1935, the Japanese in Manchuria admitted that they were knocking at the door of Outer Mongolia. And out of Moscow came the point-black warning. Soviet Russia will come to the aid of Outer Mongolia if it is attacked by Japan. But the Japanese were not dissuaded. Fighting flared all along the 2,000-mile frontier. By 1938, there had been more than 23 separate bloody skirmishes. The bloodiest of which was at Chang-Pu Kang on the Soviet boundary. Japan asked for an armistice. Russia granted it. But sternly warned Japan that unless she stopped violating the border, severe punishment was certain. Nevertheless, the next year at No-Mon-Han. Well, General, this show makes the Chang-Pu-Fang outbreak look like a Sunday school technique, huh? You Americans must not lose your sense of proportions. Hey, if a thousand planes haven't taken part in this fight, I'll buy you a new pair of boots. We shall give the Japanese as much as they send. Well, uh... Would you say, General, that the Japanese are attempting a large-scale invasion of Outer Mongolia? The largest this part of the world has ever seen. Well, my information is that at least 800 mechanized units, tanks and armored cars are in the battle. That would be a fair estimate. Well, how heavy have the casualties been? It is too early for a report. Are you concerned about the outcome? We are teaching the Japanese and learning something ourselves about Tang Huo-Feng. It is a lesson to them. Yeah, I'll bet it is at that. Thanks. The Japanese admitted 18,000 men killed at No-Mon-Han. Insisted they'd been attacked by the Mongols. To this, Moscow replied, That is ridiculous and absurd. Japan had better realized that the USSR has now grown in strength and will no longer tolerate such provocations. Russia will defend the frontier of the Mongolian People's Republic with the same determination as we defend our own frontier. By the middle 30s, Russia and Japan had made it clear to each other that they were willing to fight if they must. But Russia had offered again and again to sign a non-aggression pact and Japan had politely declined. Underlying the Japanese policy was this thinking. As long as Soviet Russia is stretched out for 2,000 miles along Japan's frontier, as long as the Russians stand on Kamchatka, and Sakhalin, and very west of and along the Mandokum border with a mighty air force with mechanized divisions and hundreds of thousands of troops and a fleet over submarines, as long as Russia hangs over us on the Pacific, Japan can never be secure. By 1936, Japan had expressed this fear by joining with Nazi Germany in the anti-comintern pact to fight the spread of communism. In this pact, the two powers that flanked Russia, her two bitterest enemies joined hands against her. But if Japan were counting on Germany, three years later in August 1939, she was to suffer a severe shock. Hitler has concluded a non-aggression pact with Soviet Russia. This will free Nazi Germany to face Britain and France on the Western Front. Likewise, it frees Soviet Russia to face Japan in the Far East. There's a jolt for Japan? Yeah. Japan was counting on Germany to help her against Russia. Hitler is looking out for himself. Sure, but I thought after signing that anti-comintern pact that Hitler was against any deal with the Russians. Yeah, so did Japan. Kind of leaves Japan holding the bag, doesn't it? But Japan was sitting tight and a year later she had her inning. Hitler was beginning to show his hand. He was trying to bring Russia into the camp of the Axis by persuasion, if possible, by force if necessary. The first step was to transform the anti-comintern pact into the tripartite pact with Italy and Japan. Well, the Russians didn't fall for that. No. I guess Japan and Russia began to think Hitler was double-crossing both of them. Japan was playing both ends. In the spring of 1941, Hitler was getting ready to attack Russia, counting on Japan's health. In the midst of these preparations, it was Japan's turn to jolt Hitler. Russia have just concluded a neutrality pact pledging to respect each other's territorial integrity and inviolability for a period of five years. Japan also agreed to respect Russia's interest in outer Mongolia and Russia agreed to respect Japan's interest in Manchuria. Well, that looks like Russia and Japan are going to patch up the differences after all. Well, anyway, it means that neither Russia nor Japan is willing to go to war against the other for the sake of a guy named Hitler. It meant that basically Japan and Russia were not going to fight each other unless they had something to gain by it. For themselves. It did not mean that either Japan or Russia would relax its stern vigil on the other. In June 1942, a Russian ship was sunk by a submarine. The Russian ship was torpedoed by an American submarine. The ship was not sunk by the Americans. It was sunk by a Japanese submarine. Treaties are no treaties. Understandings are no understandings. The Russians are mincing no words in their relationships with Japan. Japanese ruling circles must realize that peace and neighborly relations with Soviet Russia are more advantageous than constant clashes. It is necessary that the Japanese military and fascist cliques, whose heads have been turned by military successes, realize that their prattle about an annexationist war in the north may cause damage most of all to Japan herself. These are the facts in the case of Russia versus Japan. Behind Matsuoka's boast that he will plant the Japanese flag on the Urals is a tangled skein of weedling and conivalry, of bluffing and brutality, of ambition and rivalry stretching back through the years. To tell the significance of these facts, the national broadcasting company presents Dr. H. H. Fisher, professor of history and authority on Russia, of Stanford University. The next voice you will hear will be that of Dr. Fisher. We take you now to San Francisco. When Mr. Matsuoka said he would plant the Japanese flag on the Urals, he may have been talking just to hear himself talk, or he may have been saying, in a kind of political double-talk, that Asia is not big enough to accommodate two sets of ideas and policies so opposed and irreconcilable as those of the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire. Forty years ago, as we have just heard, Russia blundered into a war with Japan for the control of Korea, Manchuria and Mongolia. Imperial Russia was following the European example of conquest and exploitation of China, and Japan was both eager to follow that example and afraid that she would be the next victim unless Russia was stopped. Much has happened in the four decades since the Russian-Japanese War. Russia has been turned upside down by a tremendous revolutionary upheaval. Japan has remained unchanged in fundamentals. She has continued to imitate the worst practices of the Great Powers, and she has conquered a vast empire of three million square miles, next to the largest in the world, with a population of 450 millions, one-fifth of all the people there are. She is outwardly at peace with Russia. Yet beneath the brittle surface of that peace are antagonisms deeper and more compelling than those that made the war 40 years ago. These antagonisms concern more than fisheries and boundaries. They concern the future status of that half of the world's population living between the Red Sea and the Pacific, including those who live on the Japanese islands. In the first years after World War I, Soviet Russia supported the Chinese nationalist campaign to overthrow the old order in China and to free that country from the unequal treaties and the special privileges extorted by foreign powers. After a while, this Chinese-Soviet collaboration came to an end. The Russians, of course, were not wholly unselfish, but their aid did not involve the occupation of Chinese territory by Russian forces, nor was there any claim that the Russians as a nation had been especially endowed and divinely appointed to be the leader and emancipator of East Asia. The Russian policy, on the contrary, might be said to support the theory that the Lord helps those who help themselves. A nation becomes free, in other words, not by exchanging one set of chains for another, but by uniting its forces under the inspiration of revolutionary ideals. In this case, under the aspirations for national self-determination and social justice. These revolutionary ideals are only distantly related to the dull and pedantic theories over which the European disciples of Karl Marx have split hairs and broken heads for so many years. They are, on the contrary, a call to action for millions who have been oppressed and exploited by native and foreign masters. Now Japan says that she wants to help China, too. There is to be a new order in Asia, with no more white supremacy and no more western imperialism, but a co-prosperity sphere based on the principle of Asia for the Asiatic. Well now, isn't this just about what the Russians were proposing to do? Are not these fishery and boundary disputes, this full East full dress battles and informal shootings we've just been hearing about, just temporary misunderstandings? And doesn't the Russian-Japanese neutrality pact mean, as some have suggested, that Russia and Japan really have cooked up some kind of a deal like the one between Tsarist Russia and Japan many years ago, only more comprehensive and more sinister, since it involves a division of all of Asia between these two powers? I do not believe it. This neutrality pact, for instance, is neutral only in the sense that Russia agrees not to make war on Japan. Russia continues to help China to resist Japan, and she continues to denounce Japan's predatory policies. And the course of the fisheries disputes and the frontier fighting shows that Russia is becoming less rather than more accommodating to Japan's wishes. In the second place, the Japanese leaders certainly will not encourage or even permit social justice in East Asia when they deny it to their own people. Finally, there's no more room for self-government in Japan's new order in Asia than in Hitler's new order in Europe. The purpose of the great co-prosperity sphere is not to realize Asiatic aspirations for social justice and self-government, but to serve the interests of the rulers of Japan, whose emperor, they say, is incarnate deity, who are themselves the descendants of the gods and who aim by such means as may be necessary to bring together all the races of the world into one happier core. That's the engaging way the Tokyo War often puts it. And so as we look across the Pacific, we shall do well to view that long line where the forces of Japan and Russia now face each other, not as an area of peace in a world at war, but as a sector of the global front that is inactive temporarily. Thank you, Dr. H.H. Fisher. You have been listening to the Pacific story presented by the National Broadcasting Company in its affiliated independent stations as a public service to clarify events in the Pacific and to make understandable the cross-currents of life in the Pacific basin. For a reprint of this Pacific story program, send 10 cents and stamps or coin to University of California Press, Berkeley, California. The Pacific story is written and directed by Arnold Markless. The original musical score was composed and conducted by Thomas Paluso, your narrator, Gaine Whitman. This program came to you from Hollywood. This is the National Broadcasting Company.