Foreign News: Progress

Apart from Japan’s major move last week in attempting to disorganize all resistance to her armies by destroying the capital of China (see above) chief events of the war were :

Fall of Paoting. Japan’s main army, advancing down upon the Yellow River from North China, had failed up to last week in its objective of “destroying” and not merely beating back the retreating Chinese troops. Finally the Japanese, after rolling their conquest southward 50 mi. in the preceding ten days, not only took the city of Paoting (see map, p. 17) with its huge walls and 80,000 inhabitants but surrounded it, so that as Chinese troops fled out the back gates Japanese machine gun crews “annihilated them to the last man.” Even so, conquering General Count Juichi Terauchi’s army had gotten slightly behind its timetable, the Japanese lines were lengthening ominously as they stabbed further into China, and on the whole so many retreating Chinese managed to escape and fight again another day that Japanese headquarters were tense with strain—afraid of sudden intervention by Soviet Russia should it seem to Moscow that Tokyo’s forces are overextended. In a stiff note this week Moscow explicitly rejected Japanese charges that Chinese planes disguised as Japanese were going to bomb the Soviet Embassy at Nanking, warned that if it is bombed under any circumstances the Soviet Union will hold Tokyo “responsible.”

Stab at Suiyuan. Japan’s Kwantung Army, recent conquerors of Chahar Province, swung furiously westward last week in efforts to break through into Inner Mongolia and cut off China from Soviet-dominated Outer Mongolia whence supplies are streaming to aid Nanking. No correspondent was reported within hundreds of miles of this most vital offensive, watched with cat-like concern by Tokyo, but the Japanese claimed they had broken through Chinese defenses on the frontier of Suiyuan, seized strategic rail junctions.

Plague & No Prisoners. The cholera scare at Shanghai (TIME, Sept. 27) had grown to a ghastly actuality last week with 1,600 cases in the International Settlement alone. Reputedly thousands of natives were down with the plague in their Chapei section into which Japanese sent occasional shells and bombs.

“Cold weather will lessen the cholera danger and do more good than all the doctors in China!” was the hope all Shanghai voiced. Correspondents were startled to see internes working tirelessly over plague victims who to a layman’s eye showed no sign of life whatever, although many thus stricken have been saved. Marveled a newsman who had been out on an ambulance: “They all looked dead to me!”

“Chicago” Bombed. In Central China are the rich Wuhan Cities—Hankow, Wuchang and Hanyang—of which Hankow is famed as “China’s Chicago.” Its citizens began by feeling nearly as safe as Chicagoans would feel if an enemy invading the U. S. had only reached New York. Shanghai is the New York of China and from it last week Japanese bombers easily flew the 450 miles up river to the Wuhan Cities which had only the most inadequate anti-aircraft defense. Instead of having to power-dive, dump bombs and escape as at Nanking (see p. 17), Japanese bombers let go their explosives at leisure while escorting Japanese pursuit planes came skimming down and machine-gunned masses of civilians in the streets.

3,000 at Canton. Small-statured, nimble-witted South Chinese supply most of their country’s emigrants. Chiang Kaishek, no Cantonese, saw to it that Chinese planes and anti-aircraft guns were ready last week to defend Canton, the teeming, sultry New Orleans of China, but Japanese aircraft carriers apparently lying invisible out at sea sent in overwhelming waves of bombers. Canton censorship had to be clapped on tight and apparently there was some panic. Dispatches dribbling through reported 3,000 Cantonese killed, the worst air butchery of the war, and thousands of Cantonese “roaming the streets, wild-eyed and deranged with terror.”

Submarine & Junks. Off Hong Kong the German steamer Scharnhorst rescued ten Chinese fisher folk who said they had been clinging for five days to bits of wreckage. Bug-eyed, they told how a Japanese submarine had ruthlessly cannonaded and sunk eleven Chinese fishing junks out of a fleet of twelve, drowning 300 fishermen, wives & children.