WAR IN CHINA: Chinese Corridor

Compared with China’s 24 provinces, Tweedledum and Tweedledee are easy to keep straight. There are Hupeh, Hopeh. There are Shensi, Shansi. There are also Hunan, Honan. To say nothing of Kansu, Kiangsu, Kiangsi, Kwangsi, Kwangtung (not to be confused with Kwantung, in Manchukuo).* When the Japanese renewed military operations in China on a big scale, they made things as Tweedledum as possible for U. S. campaign followers by going to work in Kiangsi.

Kiangsi—”West of the (Yangtze) River”—lies in Southeastern China, at the centre of the triangle formed by Shanghai, Hankow, Canton. With neighboring Hunan it forms a natural corridor of parallel rivers and ridges from Central to Southern and Southwestern China. Chinese colonists, early British explorers like Macartney in 1793 and Amherst in 1816, the wildfire Nationalist Armies in 1926-27, the trunk line of the Peking-Hankow-Canton railway—all chose the corridor for their routes. And so, last week, did the Japanese Army.

First objective of the renewed offensive was Changsha, capital of Hunan, site of Yale-in-China. The city is no prize, for what remained after panicky, fleeing Chinese set fire to it last November has been further devastated by Japanese bombers.

(The Yale-in-China campus has so far escaped bombs and fires.) But Changsha would serve as a stepping stone to China’s southwesternmost provinces, which are the last open doors to the Western World. If and when the Japanese control those provinces, they will have practically all there is.

With an air arm knocking the Chinese Army on top of the head while infantry dealt uppercut after uppercut, the Japanese went ahead fast—along the corridor into Hunan from Kiangsi, to within 20 miles of Changsha. At week’s end Chinese Government officials said that the city, being unimportant strategically, would soon be abandoned. At one time, said Japanese reports, the Chinese front broke and fled so hysterically that they ran bang into their own advancing reinforcements, milling like frightened lambs. Calmly the Japanese strafed and bombed the whole bloody tangle. Fortnight’s casualties, according to Japanese estimates (salt to taste): 8,200-10,000.

The Chinese answer to this drive was a surprise attack on the flimsy Japanese garrison which has patrolled the 22-mile strip of land adjacent to Hong Kong since a landing party seized it in mid-August. The attack had a temporary success, but it was only a diversion. Furthermore, it was a diversion which (along with the news that Britain was removing five gunboats from China waters because of “more pressing needs” elsewhere) only served to remind the Japanese that right now might be a sweet time to take Hong Kong.

*These similar names were not adopted out of perversity. All mean something, e.g., Honan is South of the (Yellow) River, Hopeh is North of the (Yellow) River, Hupeh is North of the (Tung Ting) Lake, Hunan is South of the (Tung Ting) Lake.