JAPAN-CHINA: Two Fronts

In Tokyo last week, Cabinet Ministers scuttled in & out of Emperor Hirohito’s moat-encircled palace. The assent of the Son of Heaven was required to dozens of decisions, most important of all to the drastic decision of the military high command to ship Japan’s entire regular army —some 260,000 men—across the sea to China.

Staring glassily through his myopic eyes, and nodding his flat, imperial head, Hirohito gave approval to military plans which launched Japan upon a great national adventure.

Three Milleniums. Every few centuries since long before Christ, history has repeated itself in China. A warlike people, coming usually from the north, covets the vast fertile plains lying north and south of the peninsula of Shantung (see map, p. 18). Advancing step by step in a few years or a few generations, they seize the ground they covet. Such was evidently the modest plan of the Japanese who know their history when, advancing from Manchukuo, they set out in July to take possession of the northern part of Hopei Province. Their plans for an inexpensive pay-as-you-go conquest was rudely upset by the explosion at Shanghai when the Chinese attempted to bomb the Japanese admiral’s flagship and attacked the Japanese forces in the International Settlement (TIME, Aug. 23 et seq.).

Last week’s decision to ship the entire Japanese Army to China meant but one thing: Japan had committed herself to speeding up the slow process of history many times repeated in-three milleniums. At Shanghai,-nearly 100,000 Japanese troops were already involved. The campaign could no longer be fought locally. A new field of operations had been opened and the great triangle between Peiping, Shanghai and the mountains on the west had become a potential battleground.

Two Commanders. To undertake this great campaign, the Japanese Government appointed General Iwane Matsui to supreme command of the combined army and navy forces. Matsui understands the Chinese almost as well as his own countrymen, once cooperated with that intense Chinese patriot Sun Yatsen, “Founder of the Chinese Republic,” to promote “Pan-Asianism” in China. Though this credo was directed against China’s National Government as well as against Russia, Matsui was shrewd enough to fool a good many naturally-cautious Chinese, was received with open arms wherever he went. Now his job is not to fool them but to fight them.

Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, knowing the mettle of this opponent, retaliated in kind. Over the Chinese forces in the Shanghai area—some 300,000—he put his onetime bitter enemy, General Pai Tsung-hsi, long held China’s most brilliant military strategist. Promptly the campaign began to take shape.

Shanghai Campaign. To the mouth of the Yangtze steamed Japanese troopships with 55,000 aboard. Some 13,000 landed at various points near Woosung at the junction of the Whangpoo and Yangtze north of Shanghai; the rest, 42,000, stayed aboard waiting for an all-clear signal, while Japanese men-of-war made demonstrations along the shore. When the Japanese made their main landing in force, the first 700 men ashore, led by 70 picked troops who formed a shirodasukitai (“White Band of Death”), swept the first Chinese aside, pushed on towards what they thought was the second defense line of the Chinese. As soon as they reached it, hidden mines were exploded and those Japanese who were not blown to bits were wiped out by sheets of machine-gun fire.

Landing effected on the bank of the Yangtze northwest of Shanghai, the Japanese pushed southward on a broad front trying to catch the Chinese army in a pincers, of which their own forces in Shanghai were the other prong. General Pai Tsung-hsi promptly began to retire to the west, covering the railroad to Nanking.

The first result of this action was to relieve the Japanese bluejackets who for two weeks have been attacked in Shanghai and to save the 3,500,000 non-combatants in Shanghai from immediate danger. For the first time in a fortnight there were normal crowds in the streets. In the International Settlement urbane escapists sat in battered bars and scarred nightspots without fear of having their highball glasses blown from their fists.

Blockade. Next step of the Japanese was to declare a blockade of the Chinese coast from Shanghai almost to Hongkong. At first Japan announced that the blockade would be aimed only against Chinese shipping. Few days later, still without formal declaration of war, Japan went one better, threatened that U. S., British and other foreign ships would also be searched for contraband if they put in at Chinese ports. Despite this neither London nor Washington put down a firm foot even when the British freighter Shengking, on its way to evacuate refugees from Shanghai, was questioned by a Japanese warship before being allowed to plow up the Whangpoo. Meanwhile the blockade not only cut off Chinese supplies but hit the Chinese treasury by reducing the collection of customs revenues.

“Unbounded Exasperation.” One morning two long limousines sped along the road from Nanking to Shanghai. A Union Jack fastened to the radiator of each car was whipped smartly by the breeze. Without warning, about 50 miles from Shanghai, a Japanese plane zoomed down to within 20 yards of the first car, riddled it with machine-gun fire. The driver. Colonel W. A. Lovat-Fraser, British Military Attaché, stopped. Slumped in the back seat, with blood gushing from his middle was 51-year-old, baldish Sir Hughe Montgomery (“Snatch”) Knatchbull-Hugesson, Britain’s Ambassador to China, one of her smartest & youngest diplomats. His back was broken; he had been hit in the liver. So ended his errand: to visit Japanese Ambassador Shigeru Kawagoe at Shanghai to present one of those peace-plans that the British Government is tireless in proposing. It was not to the Japanese Ambassador that Sir Hughe was rushed by the rest of his party (all uninjured) but to the Country Hospital in Shanghai’s International Settlement, where a U. S. Marine Navy Pharmacist’s Mate Horace Albert Thomson obliged with a blood transfusion. Instead of making a formal apology the Japanese rebuked the British Ambassador for not having a Union Jack spread on the roof of his car. The attitude of Whitehall to this attack on the sacrosanct person of their Ambassador was “one of unbounded exasperation.” Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden promised to take “appropriate measures,” dispatched a note to Tokyo.

This consisted of a demand for a formal apology, suitable punishment of those responsible, and “an assurance by the Japanese authorities that necessary measures will be taken to prevent recurrence of events of such a character.” The British took no special notice of the fact that it was His Majesty’s Ambassador who had been shot in the liver; the note went so far as to say that his diplomatic status was “irrelevant.” “The real crime” was that the car’s occupants were “non-combatants.” The British Foreign Office thus really sidestepped the implications of an attack on “the person of His Majesty in China.” That charge would have called for sterner measures than they were prepared to carry through.

Raids. In Nanking one night the diplomatic corps was giving a dinner for U. S. Ambassador to China Nelson Trusler Johnson to celebrate his thirtieth year of diplomatic service. Shortly after midnight the bantering, toasting diners heard the sudden scream of sirens. They knew they were about to be raided from the air, but decided to stick it out. Through the moonlit sky roared a squad of Japanese bombers, plunked incendiary bombs on the capital’s poorer districts. Three times they returned, until the more congested quarters of the city were in flames. One hundred and fifty coolies, trapped in squalid mud huts, were burned alive.

Presently twelve Japanese planes appeared over Nantao, a native quarter of Shanghai, hurled five bombs on Shanghai’s South Station. Scores of natives, waiting docilely for a train to Hangchow, were caught unawares, blown to bits. The attacking airmen, obviously ordered to destroy the station, showed marksmanship almost as bad as that of the Chinese who bombed Shanghai the week before. Most of the bombs fell several blocks away on citizens jampacked in the section of Nantao containing the Bird Market, Willow Pattern Teahouse, other tourist haunts. At least 400 people, including 15 children under two years, were killed.

Next day 20 miles off the China coast the U. S. liner President Hoover, with Dollar signs as big as billboards on her funnels, plowed towards Shanghai with 263 U. S. refugees aboard. Out of the sky three small bombs came crashing down on the ship, shell-shocking three passengers, wounding six of the crew, killing one, damaging hull and deck. Shanghai’s Mayor 0. K. Yui promptly admitted Chinese responsibility, promised fullest redress: four bombers had mistaken the liner for a Japanese troopship. Washington immediately cabled Ambassador Johnson to make a vehement protest.

In the North. With Peiping and Tientsin already fallen to the Japanese since the outbreak of war, July 7, some 5,000 more square miles of Chinese territory were under “Japanese protection” last week. Along a wavering line of 150 miles from Nankow to Tangku on the coast (see map) a Japanese army of 120,000 battled with a Chinese force that outnumbered them two to one.

Most decisive fight was the capture by Japanese of the twelve-mile-long Nankow pass, strategic gateway to Chahar Province. For 16 days Japanese battalions had struggled with dogged Chinese defenders in pouring rain and a sea of mud. Victory came when the Chinese flank on a 4,000 ft. ledge mounting the pass was turned by Japanese, who crossed the mountains to the west, savagely attacked from above with boulders and bayonets.

The Japanese made one other major gain. With the help of Prince Te, a renegade Mongol who has long been a headache to the Nanking Government, Japanese troops, mainly from Manchukuo, battered their way from the North into Kalgan, the capital of Chahar on the Peiping-Suiyuan railroad. Ultimate aim of the Japanese was to take over the entire length of this railroad, thus thrusting a Japanese wedge between China and possible assistance from Sovietized Inner Mongolia.

Meantime the Soviet Union signed a treaty with China promising that neither would aid an enemy attacking the other. Though this did not commit the Soviet to sending help to China it was a slap in Japan’s eye and Japan could not but suspect “secret clauses” which might eventually bring Russia into the war. Entirely bloodless but saddest incident of the week for Japan was the announcement that since the war began she has had to export over $65,000,000 worth of gold. This brought her slender gold reserve down to a still slenderer $325,000,000.