4 INTELLECTUAL COOPERATION IN WAR-TIME AND PLANS ... 373the concern of every American as events in Europe’ and that the war in
Europe was ‘inextricably linked’ to the war in the Pacific.^85
In a letter to Raymond B. Fosdick at the Rockefeller Foundation, a
body which continued to be a great supporter of the IPR’s work, Carter
stated that the Berlin Pact signalled that the United States, the British
Dominions in the Pacific and the ‘orphaned French and Dutch colonies
in the Far East and the Pacific’ were facing ‘new and critical dangers.’^86
In terms of the inextricable link between the wars in both regions, Carter
might well have been referring not simply to the formal link which was
the Berlin Pact, but to the consideration that unchecked aggression in Asia
could not be dissociated from subsequent acts of aggression elsewhere.
Indeed, the view that there was a link between unchecked aggression in
the Pacific region and acts of aggression elsewhere had been for some
time a common-place view. In this regard, the following statement of the
Chinese Ambassador to London in 1936 is worth noting: ‘Today the sky is
positively darkened with chickens coming home to roost’.^87
Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, the American Council of the
IPR swung its full support behind the American people’s prosecution of
the war against the Axis powers, promising to provide all that it could by
way of ‘reliable information and analysis.’^88
It was against this background that the first IPR conference held dur-
ing the Pacific War convened. The conference ran from December 4 to
14, 1942, and, like the ‘Study Meeting’ that the IPR had held in 1939,
took place on the Atlantic rather than Pacific coast: at Mont Tremblant in
Quebec. Holland observed in the preface to a preliminary report of the
(^85) Edward C. Carter, 1940, quoted in Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 250.
For the continuing Rockefeller support for the IPR during the war years, see Akami,
Internationalizing the Pacific, 330, n.35.
(^86) Edward C. Carter, 1940, quoted in Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 250. Morley
noted that the ‘original plan of organization’ for the LON Secretariat ‘called for an American
Under Secretary-General and Mr. Raymond B. Fosdick was actually appointed to the post
in 1919. He resigned his post ‘following the Senate’s failure to ratify the Peace Treaty,
and thereby the Covenant.’ Originally, there were only two under secretary generals: Inazō
Nitobe from Japan and Dionisio Anzilotti from Italy. ‘[A] German Under-Secretary was
added when Germany entered the League on September 8, 1926.’ Morley, The Society of
Nations, 274. See also Walters, History of the League of Nations, 78.
(^87) William Arnold-Forster, review of The Sino-Japanese Controversy and the League of
Nations, by Westel W. Willoughby, Political Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1936): 305–6.
(^88) Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific, 251–52.