WAR IN CHINA: Never Anything Greater!

“Never Anything Greater!”

Of China’s 4,480,992 square miles, Japanese forces held:

This week: 616,750

Week ago: 614,725

Month ago: 565,000

Year ago: 500,000

For the first time in ten weeks all the rival Japanese forces at Shanghai—the land, sea and air forces of the Son of Heaven—buried their mutual jealousies last week and clicked together in the unified “big push” which Japanese spokesmen had been daily heralding for so long that Shanghai correspondents were becoming incredulous. In Tokyo the Ministers of the Army and Navy are not responsible to the Premier but only to the Emperor direct, this peculiar setup often leading to excessive maladjustment between the fighting services. Last week they slugged together to bend back the Chinese line in the country zone outside Shanghai so sharply that it would be impossible for Chinese forces to continue to hold Chapei in the urban zone (see map, p. 19). Tazang was the town at which the Japanese decided to push big, after bombing and shelling it for nearly a month, and last week their assault was highly mechanized.

Japanese tanks thrust snorting into Tazang in the wake of a “creeping barrage” laid down by land artillery, supplemented by the big guns of Japanese warships. Infantry swarmed in only after the tanks had dashed back & forth through the streets of Tazang, “shooting up the town” to break Chinese morale. Behind the Japanese troops came Japanese armored cars and “mopping up squads.” These found such grim evidence of stubborn resistance in the face of certain death as Chinese machine gunners who had handcuffed themselves to their guns and died at their posts.

As the rural battle line bent back, Chinese General Sun Yuan-liang, seeing it had become impossible to hold Chapei, ordered what remained of this heavily bombed and shelled Chinese shambles to be set afire. Hurling sulphur and other incendiary materials, Chinese firebugs heroically raised an immense pall of smoke over Chapei beneath which the Chinese defenders executed in the night what foreign military experts in Shanghai called one of the most orderly and efficient retreats ever made in Oriental warfare. Stimulating to morale throughout China was the staying behind in a Chapei warehouse of 500 Chinese troops of “Chiang’s Own”—the famed 88th Division of Chinese Premier & Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. Japanese troops, advancing at sunrise under their Empire’s Rising Sun flag, soon had the warehouse surrounded on three sides, the fourth being toward the British position in Shanghai’s International Settlement. As Japanese light artillery poured converging fire into the warehouse, it flamed in world headlines as “The Chinese Alamo.”*

“Shed your last drop of blood, fulfilling your sacred duty for the glory of the Chinese race, the Chinese Republic and the Chinese Revolutionary Army!” ordered General Sun in a message to the defenders of the Chinese Alamo. “I and your comrades salute you! Although, in accordance with orders, I have led my other men to new defense lines my spirit and my heart are with you in Chapei.”

To Mayor O. K. Yui of Greater Shanghai the Chinese Alamo messaged: “Send us 500 lb. of salt, 500 lb. of sugar and 50,000 Chinese biscuits. We will hold out seven days. In that time the tide may turn in our favor. Otherwise, you will never see us again.”

“How can you send all that to the Alamo?” correspondents asked Mayor Yui. “Never you mind,” said he mysteriously, “I will find a way.”

A news ogre became Japanese Rear Admiral Tadao Honda as correspondents put his “sneers” on the cables. According to the admiral, the 500 in the warehouse were only “more or less heroes.” After a final Japanese ultimatum that the Alamo must surrender or be wiped out, its Chinese commander, Colonel Hsieh Chin-yuan, messaged to his superior General Sun: “Death is an unimportant question! The sacrifice of our lives will not be in vain.”

All this while the British had been messaging that any Chinese who cared to risk bolting out of the Alamo and running a 20-yard gantlet of Japanese fire to the British position would be safely interned. The world press and the Chinese press rang with the defiance of Colonel Hsieh, but phlegmatic British Tommies kept bringing up more & more motor trucks to be used in carting away some hundreds of gantlet-runners, should they arrive.

Japanese who tried completely to surround the Alamo, that is get between it and the British, thought better of this when Tommies pointed British rifles at them, lest they trespass on the edge of the British position. In the Alamo, meanwhile, 123 of the 500 defenders had given their lives for China. The other 377, after holding out for four of the seven days they had promised, ran the 20 yards to the British. Each Chinese carried his full arms and equipment. Together the 377, of whom 26 staggered in gravely wounded, lugged with them 24 light machine guns, six heavy machine guns. The Chinese Alamo commander was the last to run to safety and tears coursed down the cheeks of Colonel Hsieh as the British warmly showed they considered him and his men heroes. Cried British Brigadier General Alexander Patrick Drummond Telfer-Smollett: “I have never seen anything greater!”

There was no comment from Premier & Generalissimo Chiang on the un-alamoing of the Alamo, but significantly two days previously the Premier’s famed wife had written in her column (TIME, Oct.11) on the war: “I am torn between the desire to save the lives of these brave men (in the Alamo) by persuading the Generalissimo to give the necessary order and my loyalty to China. . . . The Generalissimo knows that Colonel Hsieh Chin-yuan and his men do not want the order to surrender, as they prefer to die for China. . . . Their sacrifice will greatly inspire our people and stiffen the morale of the country.”

Mme Chiang, who “wears the pants” (see cut, p. 18) in the Chinese Government to a greater extent than any woman since the death of the dread Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, wrote this hospitalized in Nanking after her car had skidded last week into a ditch on the Shanghai road, constantly traveled by herself and the Generalissimo. “Is it not the irony of fate that I nearly met death by an act of God,” wrote pious Mme Chiang who converted her husband to Christianity, “while the Japanese have been trying to assassinate me by bombs ever since the beginning of the war?”

The Premier & Generalissimo used to affect a garb as simple as Hitler’s or Stalin’s, today appears in resplendent uniform with the spruce, German-trained troops of “Chiang’s Own” on posters splashed widely about China (see cut). From Shanghai arrived last week the best picture yet of Chiang’s grim, steel-helmeted, Prussian-disciplined regulars advancing recently at Lotien in the teeth of Japanese fire which sprawled some grotesquely as they fell (see cut). Old-style Chinese troops, such as still compose most of the country’s forces, would have fled in floppy straw hats, perhaps throwing away their rifles, but salvaging their teakettles and paper umbrellas.

Significance. Japan’s “big push” was accompanied by the bursting for the first time of stray Japanese shells in such fashion as to kill four British Tommies and wound six more by this week. Tommies had held their fire while General Telfer-Smollet flung himself flat and escaped a round of Japanese machine gun bullets fired at fleeting Chinese, but foreign tempers in Shanghai were so short that even U. S. Admiral Harry Ervin Yarnell gave orders that U. S. forces in Shanghai, if attacked, were to fight back.

The Chinese had retreated to a new line, strongly entrenched and fortified regardless of cost, and although the Japanese this week made a short advance west of Shanghai, crossing Soochow Creek under a smoke screen and strongly resisted by the Chinese, all indications favored weeks more of Shanghai warfare in such close quarters that every day Japan risked an incident which would plunge her into fighting with one or another Great Power. It was this which made the 45 sq. mi. taken at Shanghai last week more desperately important than 1,980 sq. mi. quietly taken by Japanese forces pressing down from North China last week, almost unobserved by the world’s gapers at headlines.

For if the U. S. or the British flagship in Shanghai waters should be sunk, or if General Telfer-Smollett or Admiral Yarnell should be killed, it might mean more to staggering China than the Nine-Power Conference which meets at Brussels next week. Japan last week refused to attend, and so did Germany. Japanese took the conduct of General Telfer-Smollett as proving this up to the hilt, claimed to have found in the captured Alamo quantities of “fresh food which could only have been smuggled in from the British.” Vice Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa this week was so boiling mad on his flagship at Shanghai that when a British soldier was reported to have touched a machine gun on a Japanese river launch, the Admiral reported to his Emperor: “The Japanese Navy has been insulted.”

*In 1836 at San Antonio, Tex. 180 Americans died rather than surrender to 4,000 Mexicans who had surrounded them in the Alamo.