CHINA: Autumn Offensive

Last week brought “Double Ten” (the tenth day of the tenth month) again in China—the 36th anniversary of the founding of Sun Yat-sen’s republic. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek flew back to Nanking from a tour of battlefronts, and broadcast to the nation. Proudly he ticked off the year’s brighter spots: capture of the Communist capital, Yenan; the mopping up on the coast of Shantung. Then he made a promise about what was happening north of the Great Wall: “We will not lightly yield one single inch. . . .”

Yet, there, in the coal-and iron-laden valleys of South Manchuria, the Chinese Nationalists almost literally had their backs to the Wall. They were not yielding lightly, but Chiang’s troops were bending backwards under the weight of the sixth major thrust by the Chinese Communists since V-J day.

The autumn offensive of Communist General Lin Piao’s “United Democratic Army” had begun Oct. 1. Pinching from both sides of the Mukden-Changchun railway, it had quickly crunched more than 100 miles of the Government-held corridor. Changchun itself, which the Japanese had planned as the modern stone & steel capital city of Manchuria, was surrounded., The big iron works at Anshan (or what remained after Russian removals following V-J day) were at the edge of the Nationalist line, 55 miles south of Mukden. Communists pressed nearer the great open-pit coal mines at Fushun.

Nationalist China had once counted on the machinery and production of a tranquil Manchuria to speed Chinese recovery by months, if not years. There was almost nothing left of that vision. It would be enough now simply to hold on.

Government strategy seemed to be to let the Communist blows at the communications lines spend themselves, defend the main cities: Changchun, Szepingkai, Mukden—then sally out to restore the lines once more.

Optimists in Nanking believed that their armies could probably hold out this time. But they wondered about the offensives that seemed sure to come in the spring. And after that? Even the optimists in China knew that, in Manchuria, history was passing the eleventh hour, and that only Washington could stop the clock.