World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF CHINA: Warning in Hainan

If the Japanese had full control anywhere, it ought to have been in Hainan, the 160-by-90-mile island off China’s south coast. Tough, bandy-legged Japanese marines seized Hainan in February 1939 and turned it into a training school. In the surf and on the island’s beaches Japanese troops were taught tactics that helped them to win the Philippines, Malaya and the East Indies. Hainan was the main base for the invasion of French Indo-China; it supplied other offensives in the South Pacific. A big naval base is said to be under way there.

But last week it became clear that in three and one-half years of swarming over the small island, the Japanese have not been able to attain complete dominion. The Chinese High Command announced that their forces on Hainan had raided the Sanyukang railway station on Hainan’s southern coast. Results: part of the Jap garrison slain; two locomotives, 20 coaches, 200 cases of gasoline and several barracks destroyed; renewed notice to Japan that China’s will to freedom lives even in the remotest corner of a conquered island.