WAR IN CHINA: Hankow

Japanese newsorgans, paced by the potent Tokyo Nichi Nichi and Osaka Mainichi, last week made ready to cover the long-awaited fall of Hankow. Some 500 newsmen, photographers and broadcasters, specially equipped with airplane radio transmitters, were poised behind the front to record the triumphal entrance of Japanese troops. Confident Japanese commanders gave out that this would take place before October 1.

Reason for this optimism was that, after weeks of excruciatingly slow progress by naval and land forces up the valley of the broad, brown Yangtze, Japanese troops suddenly knifed through stubborn Chinese defense lines and penetrated to Wusueh, on the north bank of the Yangtze, only 80 crow miles from their goal. In Hankow, Chinese military heads, preparing for a last-ditch stand, ordered evacuation of 20,000 women to facilitate defense of the area, and by week’s end 1,000 of them were on their way to Chungking, China’s inland capital, 500 miles inland from Hankow. Foreign observers last week estimated that at least 60% of the machinery from the steel, iron, rice, flour and oil plants in the Hankow area had been moved into the interior. Along with the machinery went the thousands of workers.

For months the murky floodwaters around the Yellow River, to the north of the Yangtze, have prevented the Japanese from making a widespread onslaught on Hankow but by last week the waters had subsided enough to allow them to set their troops in motion on a 400-mile line, extending from Chengchow on the Yellow River to Teian, 45 miles south of the Yangtze.

Japanese commanders, admitting that their route to their objective literally was being carved through masses of resisting Chinese, complained that the Chinese were spoiling water supplies in their retreat by dumping their dead into wells. Chinese countered with the charge that the Japanese had used poison gas in capturing the strategic city of Kwangtsi, retaken, then lost later by the Chinese. Military authorities forwarded their proof to Geneva where China is expected to place it before the League Council session this week.