World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ASIA: The Sightless Giant

Through most of the dreary months while China waited for the western Allies to finish the job of beating Hitler first, two seaports on the East China Sea had remained free of the enemy. They were like eyes, through which China could look out to the Pacific, straining for a glimpse of the topmasts of a relieving U.S. fleet. The Japanese had closed each eye for a few months in the past, but the Chinese had reopened them. Not until this year did the Japs decide to deprive China again of what was now its last outlook to the east. Early in September, they put out the northern eye, Wenchow, in Chekiang Province.

Two weeks ago, a Jap invasion fleet from Formosa nosed up to the mouth of the Min, downstream from Foochow (see map). Assault troops swarmed ashore and drove swiftly to the suburbs of the port, whose garrison had held out in hope of welcoming an Allied invasion force. Last week a second landing was made on the south bank of the Min, catching Foochow between the two Jap columns.

The enemy lost no time in ballyhooing the discomfiture thus visited upon the elsewhere victorious United Nations. Berlin, hungry for a crumb of comfort though it fell 5,000 miles away, proclaimed: “Japanese military authorities are busy making the necessary preparations to forestall an eventual American landing on the Chinese coast. . . . The bolstering of the defenses of Formosa is one of them. . . . The area of Foochow … is likewise being furnished with a powerful defense system.”

Nor was that all. Through eastern China’s vitals, the armored worms of Japanese conquest gnawed greedily. Disintegration was apparently inevitable. When it came, it would take with it the system of air bases from which China once hoped to see U.S. and native airmen fly to beat down the defenses of .Formosa, hack deep into Japan’s vital seaborne traffic.

Scorched City. Kweilin, the city of 300 hills, was put to the torch. All but a few aged standpatters and lost children had fled three weeks earlier; its ring of air bases had been burned and blasted (TIME, Sept. 25). Now the Lo-chun-she Hotel, famous for its roast chicken and Peking duck, was gutted by flames; so were stores, cinemas, offices and factories.

Kweilin’s defenses were the best the Chinese had mustered since Hengyang (which withstood siege for 41 days). The city had miles of barbed wire entanglements; pillboxes fashioned from torndown buildings. It had the best fed, best armed, best uniformed soldiers remaining among China’s tattered legions. For commander it had bald, white-gloved General Pai Chung-hsi, one of Kwangsi Province’s best, fresh from talks with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. To aid Pai, General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell sent every ounce of U.S. small arms, mortars and ammunition that could be spared from the tonnage flown over the Hump.

Chungking did not seriously expect to hold Kweilin indefinitely. But Chungking knew that another debacle, as at Changsha in June, would have domestic political as well as international and military repercussions. The agonized fight had to go on.