A Man from Palo Alto

Without intending blasphemy, his U.S. assistants called him "Todd Almighty." He was trying to change the geography of a valley where 50,000,000 lived; he was trying to lift a terror that had recurred decade after decade for more than eight centuries; he was trying to create a farm region as big as Iowa. Oliver J. Todd of Palo Alto, Calif., engineer and humanitarian, was fighting the Yellow River.

Through the golden-green wheatfields of Honan Province, the twelfth longest river in the world ran sluggishly thick with yellowish silt from the loess lands of China's northwest. On its soggy banks last week coolies toiled with hand and basket, shovel and wheelbarrow, pitting their sweat-shiny muscles against the river. Near Kaifeng dikes were rising to replace those destroyed in 1938 by the Chinese when they scorched the earth in the path of the Jap invaders. Before the dikes were opened the river had flowed northeastward into the Pohai Gulf. Afterward, it turned southeastward and ran into the Yellow Sea. If the river could be diverted to its former bed, 1,500,000 acres of arable land would grow the grain and cotton that China needs.

China's Sorrow. Todd had spent 26 of his 65 years studying, scheming, writing about the Yellow River. He knew the river's history: it had brought rich loam soil down from the Mongolian mountains to form the fertile flat Shantung peninsula; silt deposited in the river bottom raised the surface level along half its 2,500 mile course, until its banks could not contain it. Not even Oliver Todd knew how many humans the Yellow River, China's Sorrow, had killed.

But Todd had written: "The Great Plain of China can be made a perfectly safe place in which to dwell and carry on agricultural pursuits." To prove it he was working 16 hours a day, seven days a week. An impassioned man in a blue shirt, he now rides daily back & forth along the bumpy dike tops, directing the work with his expressive hands (he speaks Chinese indifferently).

Todd's fervor has joined Communists and Nationalists in an incredible alliance against the river. At the Kaifeng gap the two factions worked peaceably within a few miles of each other. In Communist-infested Shantung local leaders promised to mend 400 miles on each river bank and to resettle half a million people now living in the proposed river bed--a painfully arduous job of dismantling and moving 1,400 villages house-by-house. The Nationalists, for their part, agreed to pay coolies in the Communist area $1,000 a day from the Nanking treasury.

Race against Time. Into the project, which rivaled the building of the Pyramids, went Chinese rock and Chinese earth, Mississippi flood mats and Douglas fir pilings from the forests of the Pacific Northwest; into it also went UNRRA money and UNRRA grain. But the most important contribution was Chinese hands --200,000 of them--working night & day.

Sometimes the unfinished dikes break, and Todd and his engineers rush in thousands of coolies for emergency repairs. Recently they plugged a break by pouring in the only material handy, 130,000,000 Ibs. of kaoliang (sorghum), sacrificing today's food for the hope of tomorrow's. A few days later bandits dynamited a stone quarry and kidnaped ten workers; the bandits had been hired by a contractor whose theory was : why spoil a good thing by finishing it?

Todd last week was racing against time. If he cannot fill in the last 500 yards of the Kaifeng gap before the July floods, all his work may be wiped out. At any moment, the delicate accord between Nationalists and Communists might break. From the river last week, Todd could hear bugle calls and see the dust of marching columns as the Nationalists reinforced their Manchuria garrisons. He feared that one side or the other might attempt to blow up his dikes in order to pin the blame on the opposition. But if he won his race, millions would live to bless Oliver Todd as millions had blest old Emperor Yu, who tamed the Yellow River (temporarily) 4243 years ago, in China's Golden Age.

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