WAR IN CHINA: East of 122

Gazing dyspeptically at the bulging belly of China’s coast on his staff maps last week, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek picked up a ruler and drew a straight line down the 122nd meridian, which almost touches Shanghai. To the world’s shipping a warning was sent that if it wished to avoid possible air bombardment all foreign ships must stay east of that line from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily. A fleet of Chinese bombers was preparing to make a desperate effort to break Japan’s blockade of her coast. Still another fleet of twelve Chinese bombers formed themselves into a ”suicide squad” sworn to destroy the recently established Japanese naval base at Pratus Shoals, 200 mi. southeast of Hong Kong. Each pilot, gunner and observer was insured for $10,000, the policies payable to the flyers’ families. Off to an unknown base in southern China they flew. By week’s end no word of their mission had been received.

China’s coast is 2,150 miles long, but even if Japan did not have the third largest fleet in the world, an effective blockade of China would still be a far easier move than an effective blockade of Spain. In all that coast there are just six ports with effective rail connection with China’s interior north-to-south: Tientsin. Tsingtao, Haichow, Shanghai, Hangchow, Canton. Shanghai is bottled up. Tientsin Japan already controls. Blockading the other ports is none too difficult, was made a thousand times easier last week by President Roosevelt’s order forbidding the exporting of munitions on U. S.-owned ships. (see p. 9).

With the coast effectively blockaded there seemed last week but two ways for any large amount of munitions to reach Chinese troops: from Russia, over the interminable caravan routes of Outer Mongolia, or from French Indo-China over the railroad from Hanoï to Yünnan in Yünnan Province. These would be thin trickles. China’s only really efficient arsenal was at Mukden, has been in Japanese hands since 1931. Total output of other arsenals in China can provide about 800,000 rounds of rifle ammunition daily (about half a round per soldier), a few field pieces, machine guns and trench mortars, but no tanks, no heavy artillery, no planes, no trucks.