The Incident Becomes a Crisis

(See Cover)

Inside a modest brick house at 2374 Massachusetts Ave., Washington, D.C., is a lot of very useful military information--but no U.S. military man knows much about it. On the walls inside hang military maps, showing in detail the dispositions of Japanese troops in China and all southeastern Asia. On chairs inside sit several men whose heads are crammed with information about the Japanese Army, how it operates and how it fights.

These men know all this and a lot more useful information, but the U.S. Army has not the benefit of it, for the simple reason that, in the six weeks that it has been available, no high-ranking U.S. Army officer has taken the trouble to call on the telephone or knocked at the door of 2374 Massachusetts Ave.

In that house is the Chinese Military Mission sent by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to help the U.S. plan and coordinate campaigns in the Far East. Head of the mission is General Hsiung Shih-hui, a quick-witted, rugged, battlewise soldier. One of its members is Peter Chuh, the Gissimo's nephew. Several of them speak as well as fight Japanese. Most of the members have known the Japanese intimately in battle--for five years past.

When they arrived on April 13, the mission delivered their letters of introduction, dropped cards on the proper authorities and rented a house. Nothing happened. Two weeks later General Hsiung issued a statement to the press in which he very pointedly said that the United Nations may not win "unless there is a unified strategy covering all theaters of operations." No one took the hint.

The East had arrived but the West was too busy to bother. The twain did not meet until this week, when some of the mission were finally allowed to sit in on a session of the United Nations High Command.

It was about time. The U.S. Army could not ignore the fact that the Japanese had started a new campaign to crush China. It is a campaign which has far better chance of success than the lesser drives of the past five years--not only because of the fall of Burma but also because of all the Far Eastern catastrophes since Dec. 7, 1941.

Today the Japanese have the choice of attacking Australia, Siberia, India, Hawaii, Alaska--or China. They may soon attempt one or more of these invasions, but one certainty is that the battle for China has already begun, with more troops than Japan used in Malaya, the Philippines and Burma combined, and that Japan has new and impelling reasons for seeing it through to a finish.

Knock Out the Runway. Since Jimmy Doolittle's deed of April 18, the Japanese have been quite naturally obsessed by fear that the United Nations will use China as a base for large-scale bombing attacks on Japan, as well as on Formosa, Hainan, Indo-China and other Japanese outpost bases. Particularly suited for such use would be the peninsula of Shantung Province, which reaches out toward Japan like an angry fist, and the great bulge of Chekiang Province, within four-motor range of half of Japan.

Shantung has supposedly been occupied by the Japs since the middle of 1938. But the Japanese recently felt it necessary to throw some two divisions into a careful mopping up of Shantung. Last week the Japanese announced that this mopping up had been accomplished.

Chekiang is another matter. Chekiang has never been subdued. It is the Gissimo's native province, and it has been the center of a highly organized smuggling trade in defiance of the Japanese blockade. It has also been the place where the Chinese have built huge, new, hopeful airfields.

Against Chekiang's slender, intense General Ku Chu-tung and his troops, the Japanese last week threw six divisions, well mechanized and war-hard, and no less than 200 planes. This force drove in several columns toward the important rail and distribution center of Kinhwa. As it drove, 42 Japanese transports crept toward the island-studded, pirate-infested coast near Foochow. There the Japanese established beachheads, from which they could strike northwest to meet southbound columns from Nanchang-clamping the jaws of a trap behind the Chinese in Chekiang.

Block the Entrances. If fear goads the Japanese to a new attack on China, opportunity also calls them. They have a chance to cut China off from all external sources of supply. They must see that roads now being built across to India never go into service, and they must prevent China's allies from establishing a steady flow of planes bearing gifts.

To this end, the Japanese sent six more divisions, supported by 500 planes (to cope with the stinging remnant of A.V.G. Tomahawks) against China's southwestern-most province, Yunnan. This force is insinuating itself into the steep, jungled, malarial edges of China in three places--up the Hanoi-Kunming railway from Indo-China, up the Burma Road, and up byroads from Myitkyina into western Yunnan.

Grab the Overland. If Japan can finally take full possession of free China's trunk railroads--particularly the north-south line from Hankow to Canton--she will have land supply routes to all her conquests except the islands and only a short sea route from Singapore to the Indies.

If Japan possesses China's overland routes, there will no longer be any point to the long-accepted U.S. naval strategy against Japan--the strategy of cutting her ocean lines to the China Sea. There will no longer be much point to the island-hopping, sealane-cutting strategy for which General MacArthur has supposedly been placed in Australia.

As a beginning to the job of grabbing China's internal lines, the Japanese have launched a drive on Changsha, which they have unsuccessfully attacked three times before. But this time the Changsha drive had behind it a power pool at and above Hankow consisting of perhaps eight divisions and at least 100 planes. The Chekiang drive also serves this communications aim: it follows, as all Japanese attacks in China have followed, the biggest railway (in this case, the Chekiang-Kiang-si) and the best roads paralleling it.

Knock-Out? This combination of Japanese moves is a graver threat to China than any that has appeared in nearly five years of war. If the Japanese attain these three ends, they may not stop there. They might see their opportunity to finish the China Incident.

For some weeks the Japanese have been building up two great troop pools. One is at Hankow in central China, the other at Saigon in Indo-China. The latter might be used against India or Australia. But if the Japanese drives now under way are successful, both might be drawn on to crush China--the southern pool to drive toward Chungking from the south; the central pool to push a drive through Sian, severing northern from middle China and cutting off Chiang from his Russian friends. These two moves, undertaken together, would constitute a giant pincers movement on Chungking.

Country's Man. "Let them come," the Gissimo said in the summer of 1940, when Chungking morale reached an all-war low, "let them drive me back into Tibet. In five years I will be back here and I will conquer all China again."

Such is Chiang Kai-shek's customary impetus. He united China once, by conquering it. Starting in the late '203 with nothing but a fledgling military academyand an incandescent spirit, he gradually subdued the selfish and the local men, the provincial brigands, the warlords, the fractious cliques, the Communists. In cam paign and persuasion he forced or con verted the Chinese into a nation.

But today the Gissimo, usually a monument of calm confidence, makes no secret of the fact that he is more worried than at any time in five years.

To a man of 54, who since 23 has devoted every waking moment of his life to making his country one, and to freeing it in every sense, this campaign threatens the worst possible personal calamity.

To a practicing Christian, a man who gets up at 5:30 every morning to read a Chinese Bible, a man who believes that right will some day prevail, this campaign is an international wrong.

To a shrewd, practical, international politician, who knows very well that the fate of free China is bound up with that of a free U.S. and a free Britain--who believes it not as a matter of remote idealism but as directly as he believes his Bible--this campaign is a world danger.

Army's Man. For this vital campaign the Gissimo's only weapon is China's army, a peasant army, full of superstitions as simple as the soil from which it springs.

The great Chiang, say his farmer-soldiers, sits like a mountain, moves like a dragon, and walks with the sure step of a tiger. Sometimes some of the soldiers get a chance to see Chiang, and when they do, they still believe this description of him. Soldiers who have fought under him say that when they knew they were to talk with him, they would write down what they planned to say, memorize it, and then be unable to speak when they looked at that calm, mysterious face with the tender eyes and jaw of iron.

Chiang the soldier says very little to his men. He listens to their reports, their suggestions or their fears. Then, with a single grunted word, hao (good) or pu (no), he makes his decision. He is a stern disciplinarian, and keeps his army taut. When he visits the fronts, he blurts words of praise or of withering criticism on the spot, in public hearing.

Chiang the soldier learned his first grown-up military lessons, ironically, in Japan. He went there in 1907, studied at the Tokyo Military Academy and then served briefly in the 13th Field Artillery Regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army. That experience still stands him in good stead, for Chiang has to fight practically without artillery, and it is useful to know how the Japanese use theirs. Chiang later learned some military theory in Russia and from German missions, but most of what he knows he learned in action. In the last 17 years there has not been a single year in which he did not have war on his hands.

Being without other tools than his peasant army, he has had to be a military improviser. With only men and space he has fought a planeless, tankless warfare; with only 18th-Century tools, he has fought a 20th-century Japanese army. The whole concept of the scorched earth has been carried out even more faithfully by the Chinese than by the Russians. The art of mass guerrilla warfare was advanced so far in China that Russia sent military missions to study it. China--and China means Chiang--developed "magnetic warfare," which means drawing the enemy out over vast expanses until his lines are embarrassingly long and snippable.

In all this Chiang has not only used a peasant army but he has educated it, as he went along, taught it to fight and taught it the elements of democracy.

Negligence Pays Off. No matter how much he educated his peasant army, Chiang would never be able to stamp out all its superstitions. One, held especially in embattled Chekiang, is that Chiang is the reincarnation of a great sea beast which used to live in the waters near Fenghua and sun himself on the sands. They say that if it rains when Chiang goes out to battle, he will win; if it shines, he will lose.

There is shrewd reality in this peasant superstition. If Chiang goes out to fight in rainy weather, the enemy cannot use his planes. Since Chiang has almost no planes--except the handful flown by Brigadier General Claire L. Chennault's brilliant Flying Tigers in Burma--this makes a difference.

Chiang has no real air force because the U.S. and Britain have sent him none. It was convenient for Washington and London to believe that because Chiang had held off the Japanese since 1937 without an air force, he could do it indefinitely. That being the case, air power could be sent to Russia, Britain, the Middle East, Australia, everywhere but China.

But if China's first five years of war have been hard, the next will be by far the hardest. Japan is free now, as she has never been before, to concentrate. There are no important threats to her flanks. The Philippines are knocked out. So is Singapore. So is Hong Kong. Indo-China is hers. MacArthur in Australia is far, and far from ready. The Russians in Siberia want no aggressive action.

There is a good chance that Britain and the U.S. are about to cash in on their negligence of China. That negligence has not been merely another case of too little and too late; it has been a case of too stuffy and too stupid. On the gamblers' rule that one should keep on backing the number that is coming up-or on the investor's rule that the way to make money is to take it out of investments that are proving weak and put it into those which are proving solid--U.S. aid should logically have been poured heavily into China.

Can Anything Be Done? In Chungking last week, Government Spokesman T. F. Tsiang told New York Timesman Harrison Forman that China has three needs: "1) bombers and pursuit planes; 2) bombers and pursuit planes; 3) bombers and pursuit planes." Actually China has other great needs: artillery, ammunition, gasoline. But the Chinese now stress the greatest need and the one on which the Allies can still deliver.

One U.S. officer who knows China and has made a brilliant showing there is General Chennault, head of the A.V.G. In Kunming last week he said that 2,000 U.S. planes could wipe out the Japanese Air Force. He added that the Japanese drive into Chekiang could not hope to knock out all the air sites from which Japan can be bombed; China is too big.

Others who know the possibilities of China are equally convinced that China has been a great military opportunity which the U.S. has neglected--an opportunity which if not grasped may not exist much longer.

Planes and plane parts can still be flown into China. So can pilots and bombs. Airfields have been built there, dozens of them, ordered by the Gissimo in hope that U.S. planes would arrive. If more, are needed he would gladly create them, as he did those already in existence, by saying: "Let there be an airfield a mile square"--a swarm of coolies covers the earth and in three weeks, four weeks, or six weeks, hills are gone, the ground is smooth and neatly paved with little rocks, each one tapped down by hand.

Is It Too Late? From fields in Chekiang, Nagasaki is only a three-hour flight and could be bombed every day. From these fields Formosa is only one hour across the water. From these fields flights of transports could have made nightly flights to Bataan and Corregidor, dropping supplies for friend and bombs for foe. From these fields the U.S. planes could smash the new drives upon China. From these fields, most important of all, bombers and fighters with cannon could have a field day riddling the steady stream of Japanese ships that now moves through the China seas supplying the Japanese in Malaya, Burma, the Indies and the Philippines--forcing the Japanese to draw their navy and their air force back to protect their communications, relieving India and Australia from danger.

The Gissimo knows all this. So do the Japanese--as their new drive testifies. But the U.S. has not yet awakened to the possibilities. Some of those possibilities cannot be realized effectively if the Japanese in this campaign get control of China's main railways. None of them can be realized if the Japanese widen much farther the wedge which they have driven between China and India.

But so far, except for the handful of A.V.G.s with obsolescent planes, no U.S. fighters or bombers are operating from China. Like Winston Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek has repeatedly said, in effect: "Give us the tools and we will finish the job." But, unlike Churchill, Chiang has still to get the tools in any quantity that counts.

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