WAR IN CHINA: Defeats Without Battles

Defeats Without Battles

On a black day last week which was both the 15th anniversary of Japan’s great Earthquake of 1923 and the 33rd anniversary of the Typhoon of 1905, the Empire was smitten by a no less violent typhoon which whirled through the neighboring cities of Tokyo and Yokohama, blew millions of tons of seawater over the breakwaters and into these cities. The dead numbered 99, thousands of flimsy wood & paper Japanese homes collapsed. Modern skyscrapers stood firm, but railway and electric services were suspended over much of the Empire. Japanese reported as a notable disaster the uprooting of a clump of ancient willow trees near the moat of the Imperial Palace of their Divine Emperor.

But the ravages of Nature have never stopped Japanese and last week they pushed on with their war in China. In Tokyo a big question was still what decisions of basic policy concerning the China war have been quietly taken by the Japanese Cabinet. Able Wilfred Fleisher of the New York Herald Tribune thought he had found out in Tokyo last week. According to him, the Cabinet decided that once the Japanese Army takes Hankow, the present Chinese capital, no further invasion of China will be pressed. Since the beginning of the war observers have agreed that the most vital question was how big a piece of China the Japanese would decide to try to chew. Thus far they have shown every sign of recklessly trying to gorge themselves to eventual suffocation.

Meanwhile, last week, Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, although continuing to evacuate Hankow and evidently believing he cannot defend it much longer, launched a Chinese offensive at the Japanese in boggy, half-flooded, malarial country near Kiukiang, 135 miles down the Yangtze River below Hankow. Even skeptical foreign observers were inclined to take at face value last week the Chinese claim that this desperate counteroffensive threw the Japanese back for heavy losses on the whole width of a 45-mile salient.

Chinese-speaking Christian missionary doctors are among the few Western observers in really close touch with China’s people, and in Manhattan arrived last week Dr. Walter H. Judd. fresh from work in Japanese-conquered territory, and Dr. Robert McClure who has been Director of the International Red Cross in Central China. They agreed that Japan “does not have the ghost of a chance to win the war,” since what they have seen convinces them that the Japanese Army of Occupation, sniped at and harassed day & night by Chinese guerrillas, is “slowly bleeding to death.” As an example, the missionary doctors described how a Japanese division of 20,000 men had been worn down in two months by Chinese guerrillas to 5,000 “without ever fighting a battle.”