World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ASIA: New Chinese Wall?

The Japanese took a leaf from the strategy book of General U.S. Grant. As Grant had sliced off the western half of the Confederacy by his Mississippi campaign, the Japs worked, with fearsome force, to cut off the western side of the clamp fastened on the Empire (see map) by Allied strategy.

The enemy’s plan had long been apparent. It was to secure the Peiping-Hankow-Canton railroad, firmly establish the Empire’s equivocal hold on southeast China east of the railroad, knock out U.S. air bases there, and try to make the coast impregnable to U.S. attack. It was also to supplement sea supply lanes under fire from Chennault and American naval attack. But only in the last four weeks had the enemy decisively written his plan in military action.

In those four weeks the Japs had snatched back miles of the railroad from Chinese guerrillas and regular troops, had swept westward to buttress their holdings against attack. They had driven south through ruined Changsha, contested for the fourth time in five years. They marched on through quiet little Hengshan, near the five sacred Buddhist mountains. This week they pierced the outer gates of a vital rail junction, Hengyang—most important city sought by the Japanese since Canton and Hankow in 1938.

Tired Troops. Before the enemy stood the tired Chinese armies of round-faced, explosive General Hsueh Yueh. Once some of China’s finest, these troops had been run through the meat grinder at Changteh last November; had still not recovered. They had had to pull out of Changsha after a stubborn, hopeless defense, to escape annihilation. This week the armies, beat out, short of food, retreated painfully on foot. Where they could stand and fight, no one seemed to know.

To support the Chinese, Claire Chennault’s tiny Fourteenth Air Force did its gallant best. More than 1,000 sorties were flown in a week* against river shipping and roads clogged with Jap columns. But the Fourteenth’s forces were spread thin over a big and complicated theater.

Its planes were needed against Jap shipping off the China coast; they were needed up north on the Yellow River, where the enemy was .trying to drive westward in Honan Province; they were needed down south on the Salween, where the Chinese were driving laboriously into Burma to join up with Stilwell’s forces.

Like their Chinese comrades, they were almost bare of motorized equipment, pitifully short of supplies, which still had to come by air over the Hump from India. Last week, south of the China theater in Burma, American, British and Chinese troops moved almost imperceptibly closer to regaining the ground over which a supply road could be thrust into China.

But if the Jap succeeded in his new China campaign, the supply route might come too late.

* A good performance in a single day for Britain-based air power: 10,000 sorties.