WAR IN CHINA: Japan’s Sorrow

In the game of war it is customary for combatants to assert that their own plays are God-guided, that the opposition’s quarterback is the Devil. Last week, when diabolical forces of nature—rains & flood —washed out those of man in central China, the ground was no sooner covered with muddy water than the air was filled with mutual recriminations.

For the Yellow River to flood is nothing new. Its Chinese name, Hwang Ho, is taken from hwang tu, the “yellow dirt” which it carries down in great quantity from Shansi and Shensi. This pale silt is constantly being dropped on the riverbed, which consequently steadily rises above the adjoining land. To keep the river in line the Chinese have long built dikes. Rising floor and walls have made the river an aqueduct, lifted its surface at high water as much as 30 feet above the surrounding plain. So frequently has the ochre stream cracked its dikes and devastated the countryside that peasants of the area call it “China’s Sorrow,” “The Ungovernable,” “The Scourge of the Sons of Han.”* Like a sluggish whiplash the river has many times changed its channel.

Last week “The Ungovernable” lashed out with a flood which promised to change not only its own course but also the course of the whole Sino-Japanese War. Severe breaks in the dikes near Kaifeng sent a five-foot wall of water fanning out over a 500-square-mile area, spreading death. Toll from Yellow River floods is not so much from quick drowning as from gradual disease and starvation. The river’s filth settles ankle-deep on the fields, mothering germs, smothering crops. Last week, about 500,000 peasants were driven from 2,000 communities to await rescue or death on whatever dry ground they could find. Thousands huddled miserably on the high right-of-way of the Lunghai Railroad, which for months has been a fulcrum for the see-sawing central China warfare.

To the Japanese, who had been pushing along the railroad toward Chengchow, hoping to make it a base for their southerly drive to Hankow, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s provisional capital, the flood was a severe setback. Tokyo papers at once accused the devilish Chinese of having sprung the dikes as a strategic military move. “An atrocity,” cried Damei, “by barbarian Chinese. . . . The Japanese are making frantic efforts to check the flow and to rescue the Chinese caught in the flood area, at the same time repulsing Chinese attacks.”

These accusations, foreign observers thought, were absurd. For the Chinese to check the Japanese advance at possible sacrifice of half a million lives would be a monstrous pyrrhic victory. Besides, dike-cutting is the blackest of Chinese crimes, and the Chinese Army would hardly risk universal censure for slight tactical gains. But this apparent innocence did not keep the Chinese from countercharging that Japanese had caused the flood by shelling and bombing the dikes near Kaifeng.

Principal Japanese fear was that the flooding Yellow would reach a long arm southward to the Yangtze, itself within five feet of overflowing and not yet at its mid-summer peak from melting mountain snows. Between them the two swollen rivers could completely swamp the Japanese offensive on Hankow, which was not going too well in any case. Early in the week the invaders had taken a giant stride nearer Hankow by capturing Anking, capital of Anhwei Province. When they ordered the U. S. Government to clear the 200-mile stretch of the Yangtze from Wuhu to Kiukiang for their advance, Admiral Harry E. Yarnell calmly answered that U. S. vessels would stand by to protect U. S. citizens. This week Chinese reported having bombed and sunk four vessels of the Japanese fleet just above Anking. War-weary and discouraged, the Japanese admitted: 1) they might have to defer their drive on Hankow until autumn; 2) they might even discuss terms. Said Foreign Minister General Kazushige Ugaki: “If any serious changes should occur in the future, it may be necessary for the Japanese Government to reconsider its decision not to deal with the Chiang Kai-shek regime.” Chinese Communists in Hankow exultantly issued a communique: “Who imagines that we Chinese troops are unable to rout the Japanese Fascist militarists?”

This week, to insure the Japanese against outraging noncombatants, General Ugaki laid out a vast no-man’s land— all territory east of an imaginary line from Sian, in Shensi, to Pakhoi, on the Gulf of Tong-king close to French Indo-China —which he asked foreigners to evacuate.

* Under the Han Dynasty (202 B.C. to 220 A.D.) China first became physically and culturally unified.