WAR IN CHINA: Double-Ten

Of China’s 4.480,992 square miles,* Japanese forces held:

This week: 600,000 Week ago: 565,000 Month ago: 527,000 Year ago: 500,000

By nature fervent in celebrating their great anniversaries with firecrackers and rejoicings, Chinese this year have been grimly preparing to hurl a supreme counteroffensive against Shanghai’s Japanese invaders as the best way of celebrating famed Double-Ten, “The 10th Day of the 10th Month,” which fell this week on Sunday, the 26th Anniversary of the Revolution of 1911 by which Chinese overthrew the Manchu Dynasty. All last week the muddy highway from Nanking, China’s capital, to Shanghai was crowded and at times choked with tractors dragging heavy artillery, huge motor trucks wallowing forward with munitions, pack trains of heavily-loaded beasts and column after column of Chinese soldiers slogging and sloshing forward. By Tuesday morning the offensive had yet to begin, and Chinese learned that the Premier had been obliged on Sunday to hand down sentences of death to officers guilty of “cowardice and military blunders” and “failure to offer heroic resistance.” Two more “high Chinese Army officers” were announced to have been executed on Double-Ten, others “severely punished.”

In Manhattan’s Chinatown, strings of pasted together dollar bills were dramatically swallowed by a cavorting paper dragon on Double-Ten, and Chinese Ambassador to Washington Dr. C. T. Wang, whose Chinese Embassy Relief Fund at 40 Wall Street handles contributions, was able to announce that $2,000,000 has already been raised among Chinese in the U. S., remitted to China.

Objectives and Rivals. Shanghai is the greatest and richest city in China but not the chief theatre of the current war, which is North China, and it was there last week that Japan’s war machine continued to devour square miles, biting into a watermelon of which the immediate rind—or present circumference of Japanese objectives—is the curving Yellow River.

The Japanese advance on land toward Shantung had approached so near its capital, Tsinan, last week that prosperous Chinese families were fleeing with their household goods by rail to the port of Tsingtao. Farther inland General Yen Hsi-shan, famed “Model Governor” of Shansi Province, was reported to have ordered the execution of his subordinate General Li Fu-ying, Commander of the 61st Chinese National Division, for abandoning Tatungfu to the Japanese without a fight after being ordered to hold it at all costs. Under terrific Japanese bombing was Governor Yen’s capital Taiyuan. In Suiyuan Province still farther inland winter has already come, but Mongolian troops allied with the Japanese last week spurred their shaggy little ponies over hard-crusted snow to engage Chinese defenders and press them back in indecisive skirmish warfare.

Off the coasts of China lay last week virtually every Japanese aircraft carrier, sending shoals of bombers off their decks daily. Chinese intercepter fighters and anti-aircraft batteries did magnificent work at the main centres of attack, such as Nanking and Shanghai, but little or nothing could be done against Japan’s methodical daily bombing of China’s necessarily exposed railway lines, the arteries of her troops and supplies. The new Hankow-Canton railway was so heavily bombed that neutrals doubted if it was still functioning this week, agreed that the line from Nanking which starts from Pukow across the river and runs to the main war zone in North China was being bombed at intervals over its whole length.

Japanese commanders even had time to worry about etiquette. Thus Major General Rensuke Isogai, advancing down the Tientsin-Pukow line and Lieut.-General Seishiro Itagaki, advancing on the Peiping-Hankow railway, are supposed to be “friendly rivals.” Out of courtesy to them. Japanese military headquarters in China make every effort to announce on the same day that each has captured a town, although this sometimes means holding up news for a day or two to let one of the generals catch up with the other. Last week General Isogai was reported furious because Tokyo had not observed this etiquette but had made the faux pas of announcing that General Itagaki captured Paoting recently on the day he took it, instead of holding the news for release two days later simultaneously with news that General Isogai had taken Tsangchow. Japanese in Tientsin, where the conventions were properly observed, learned of and celebrated both victories the same day.

“Shrapnel Swing.” In San Francisco arrived last week Shanghai’s most exuberant refugee, Miss Therese Rudolph, who says she went unscathed through the first Japanese bombing of the International Settlement (TIME, Aug. 23), has now translated the emotions she experienced into a hot-cha-cha routine, the “Shrapnel Swing” (see cut). In Shanghai last week the 2,527th case of cholera was certified in the International Settlement alone, with 563 victims of cholera dead and doctors vaccinating night and day in efforts to head off an epidemic of smallpox. Conditions were so appalling that Japanese insisted on sterilizing all food brought out of the Settlement before they would venture to feed it to Japanese troops fighting at the front.

Best news, even better than President Roosevelt’s Chicago speech,in the opinion of many Chinese, was the return to Nanking of the Soviet Ambassador and Military Attache. They recently flew by special chartered plane to Moscow, and Nanking last week hoped for “action” from the Soviet Union, feared the U. S. might hurl only words. Japanese were so scared lest the Red Army strike that Tokyo spokesmen announced 200,000 of Japan’s “best” troops have been sent to man the Manchukuo-Soviet frontier, claimed that the Japanese troops thus far sent to China are not by any means the flower of the Mikado’s legions, kept whistling loudly thus to keep up the Japanese people’s courage.

This week three fresh Chinese divisions from Nanking, defending the great supply base and military junction of Shihkiach-wang under General Cheng Chien, Chief of the Chinese General Staff, claimed to be holding out against “Japanese onslaughts so terrific that the Huto River is literally running with blood.” Tokyo officially claimed to have taken Shihkiach-wang. Japanese war correspondents lyrically compared the action to “General von Mackensen’s crossing of the Dunajec in the World War,” prematurely boasted “this seals the fate of North China.”

*These figures include Manchuria, which the Great Powers still consider part of China under the “Stimson Doctrine/’ although Japan considers it her puppet empire of Manchukuo.