Word: indoing
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...London. In nearby French-owned New Caledonia, where Governor Marie-Marc-Georges Pélicier has offered his allegiance to the Pétain Government, the local assembly declared its intention of continuing the war under General de Gaulle. With the Japanese just over the horizon and already in Indo-China (see p. 35), the New Hebrides and New Caledonia wanted what protection there still was in being an ally of Great Britain...
When Georges Mandel became Minister of Colonies in April 1938, France was growing defense-conscious. To French Indo-China was allotted 440,000,000 francs for anti-aircraft guns, coastal batteries, improved harbors, other defenses. In order to make the colony self-sufficient in wartime. Minister Mandel pushed public works, expanded light industries, built up production of coal, tin, rubber, iron, rice...
These commodities happen to be the very ones which Japan needs most. When France fell, the Japanese swooped on Indo-China like buzzards on to fresh death. Pretending that they wanted only to defeat China, they asked for and obtained closure of the military-supply route into China. One of the clauses of the closure agreement was that Japanese officials would be permitted to examine Indo-Chinese traffic into free China to see that military stoppage was complete...
Under this clause, Japan had last week virtually completed the occupation of Indo-China-without a single test of the Mandel defenses. "Traffic Examiners" swarmed into the country in mufti, in Army khaki and Navy blue, piloting airplanes and driving little brown automobiles. They proceeded to chart airports, survey highways, estimate the troop traffic which the Haiphong-Kunming railway might carry if Indo-China should by any chance allow troops to cross her territory. Merchants arrived lugging the Oriental equivalents of carpetbags. Three destroyers lay off the port of Haiphong. A large fleet, including no less than 18 troop transports...
Having thus violated the letter and massacred the spirit of the transportation agreement, the Japanese began last week to cry that Indo-China was not doing its part, that military goods were still trickling into China. Japan's chief penetrator, Major General Issaku Nishihara, flew home to Tokyo to report to his superiors, and his impetuous second-in-command, an angry colonel named Kenryo Sato, was reported to have made new demands: 1 ) Japan should be allowed to move troops into China by the Indo-Chinese railway; 2) Japanese naval planes and vessels should get port facilities at Haiphong...