The Forgotten War

In China's war-within-a-war, a great battle had ended in Chinese defeat: after six weeks of siege, heroic Hengyang, on the Hankow-Canton railway, fell to the Japanese. The last word from Hengyang's starving, desperate Chinese garrison went on the radio just a few hours before the end. Said Hengyang's commander: "I am afraid this may be my last message to you."

Not all had been lost at Hengyang. The Jap had been delayed and suffered costly losses. The Chinese and their flying American allies fought on to block a juncture between the enemy advancing from the north and the enemy stalled in the south 40 miles above Canton. The Chinese were convinced that the Japs would persist in their campaign to bring the entire railroad under their control, and thus cut China in two. They were equally convinced that the outside world did not appreciate the seriousness of the threat.

Two who did appreciate it were Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell, who had been represented in Hengyang by U.S. Army men on special duty,*and Major General Claire L. Chennault of the Fourteenth U.S. Air Force.

Chennault threw all the weight of his Fourteenth Air Force and his Chinese-American Composite Wing into close support of Chinese ground troops which kept the Japs around Hengyang closely invested and even retook two towns near Hengyang which the Japs had grabbed. Chennault's flyers gave the Japs a dose of their own 1941 medicine, by destroying 26 planes at a single field, without loss to themselves.

In this campaign the air force was fighting for its own survival as well as for the ground troops; if the Japs could seize the whole railroad, and mop up eastern China at their leisure, Chennault would lose vital bases in Kiwangsi, Fukien and Chekiang provinces from which his patrols now fan out over Shanghai, Hong Kong and the South China Sea. If these fields are lost, an approach to the China coast by westbound Nimitz-MacArthur forces will be immeasurably more difficult.

*The Japs claimed to have captured 20 U.S. officers there.

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