World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ASIA: Farewell Performance

In a sudden spurt of activity, Chinese troops last week captured Weichow Island, off the South China coast, pierced French Indo-China on a 100-mile front and pushed to within 150 miles of Shanghai. But their biggest success was the recapture of the key city of Liuchow, onetime Fourteenth Air Force base. From that war front, TIME Correspondent Theodore H. White radioed:

A trip to the China front is always an adventure. It is a bastard combination of hitchhiking by airplane, truck and jeep over a supply line roughly equal to the distance between London and Berlin. It is climaxed always by inevitable concluding hours on foot. It rarely takes less than a week to get to the point of contact in China and usually takes a fortnight. For there is only one road, one zone of maneuver, and along that road all the motley personnel of this curious theater must travel.

From headquarters in Kunming, you beat your way 400 miles to shabby, weather-worn Kweiyang and thence to field headquarters, and you’ve come only half the way. There American Brigadier General Frederick Boye and Chinese General Tang En Po jointly deploy and dispose of Chinese and American personnel in combat. Their remote control runs another 400 miles to the quiet, fluid string of foxholes that is the front, inhabited by hungry Chinese infantrymen and grimy, filthy Americans.

The front this month is distinguished by the farewell performance of one of the most colorful actors in the history of this war—the old Chinese Army.

The sprawling, creeping Chinese front is inching forward in the wake of the Japanese retreat much as a boy tiptoes through a haunted house, testing each plank as he treads. Behind this front, held by old tatterdemalion outfits, new armies and new weapons are being tooled to the future strategic pattern of the war in Asia. They are not yet in action and will not be for some time to come. In these months of grace it is the old army that is retracing the course of its great retreat last year, advancing in the same way it fled—tired, hungry, flea-bitten and malaria-ridden but still on its feet and walking.

Half Way. At the halfway mark the supply line peters off and there comes a gap between the new army and the old. You drop from the cool Kweichow plateau into the.heat of the Kwangsi plains. From there you bump by jeep over the great swath of devastation that American construction engineers left behind when they wrecked the country in the retreat of 1944. The bridges are out, and useless railways parallel the highway in twisted shreds of destruction.

In the new army the American liaison advisers live in compact groups of 20 or 30, attached to each army headquarters with their own messes and own company to shield off loneliness. But in the old army and lower down the highway, an American unit consists of four to ten men, a couple of gasoline drums, the ubiquitous jeep, a radio, and 20 to 30 cases of dehydrated rations.

The smallest knots are air liaison teams, artillery and regimental liaison units. They makeshift as they can. They consist of an officer, one or two enlisted men, a Chinese interpreter and a Chinese cook. This is the nervous system by which control runs up to American headquarters in Kunming and Chungking, 700 or 800 miles away. Each tiny cell of it consists of four or five American boys sitting in a tent or ruined farmhouse, slapping at mosquitoes, coding and decoding messages, trudging through paddies, piling up dirty tin cans beside their tents, living in stinking clothes and incessant squalor.

Half Won. This is the way the front works. The high command says: “Take Liuchow. Take it now.” And down through all the echelons the heat is turned on. At dawn the infantry goes forward through the young rice to the little whitewashed villages and rocky hills where the Japs are. There are occasional sorties but no movements are visible. There is no contact between the infantry and the OP (observation post), and unit runners come panting down the hill to say where the Jap pocket is holding them up.

Since there is no field telephone, it takes the runner an hour to get to the OP and contact artillery. The artillery listlessly pours a salvo into the vague areas where the Japs may be, and the runner goes back. The commander totals the day’s work; he has used up 51 shells in the course of the day—a heavy drain; he has forced the Japs out of one small village another kilometer up the road.

On our way back we saw one of the divisions of the new army marching down the road. They had flesh on their biceps, meat on their legs. On their shoulders they carried American Enfield rifles marked: “USA 1917.” Their pack bearers had huge spools of telephone wire slung on bamboo staves across their shoulders. When the infantry in this division goes forward, it will need no runner to carry back reports; it will use American telephones to call the artillery in from the very point of attack, and American howitzers directed by an American officer will bring support down before them at the right place at precisely the right time.

In the campaign for Liuchow and the corridor to the sea, there is none of what men of the West would call real fighting. But men are dying. The High Command must keep its new army intact; it cannot spend its growing strength in actions which the Japanese have already strategically yielded. Meanwhile someone must do today’s dying and fighting at the front, and the old army is elected. When Lieut. General Wedemeyer has finished his handiwork, the old army may be scattered, dead, or shivering with malaria on some quiescent front—but it will have done its share.