4:27

Ninety per cent of all news from China is piped to the world through Shanghai. Ninety per cent of all newshawks in China get most of their facts and write most of their stories in the lounges and bars of the three big hotels along the International Settlement's Bund: the Palace and Cathay hotels and across the Garden Bridge, the Astor House.

Early last Saturday afternoon newshawks and reporters gathered in the Palace and Cathay for their unofficial daily conferences. They winnowed the day's rumors including reports that:

P: 9,000 Japanese regulars were supposed to have been landed at Woosung, 16 miles away where Shanghai's Whangpoo River joins the Yangtze.

P: At Shanghai's North Station troop trains were arriving every few minutes jammed to the roof with Chinese soldiers from Nanking.

P: Already 30,000 crack Chinese troops were in or near Shanghai.

P: Emaciated General Tsai Ting-kai, heroic commander of the immortal 19th Route Army, defenders of Shanghai in 1932, had arrived during the night.

P: Bullet-headed General Fu Tso-yi, chairman of Suiyuan Province, with 4,000 men was still holding out against Japanese attacks in the narrow gorges of Nankow Pass.

To few if any of these reports was there any eyewitness corroboration. From the windows of the two hotels could be seen the placid bosom of the Whangpoo, and lying at anchor in midstream a line of foreign warships, prominent among them the elderly Japanese cruiser Idumo, flagship of lynx-eyed Vice Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa, Japanese commander-in-chief at Shanghai. While newshawks were still discussing their crop of rumors the antiaircraft batteries of the Idumo crashed into action. Somebody looked at a watch. It was exactly 4:27 p. m.

At that instant there came the mounting whistling scream of a falling bomb and a blast of sound that smashed every window and almost every glass in the Cathay bar. Instantly another followed, landed full on the Palace hotel across the street. In the lobby of the Palace stood United Pressman John R. Morris. He wrote:

"I ran out to the Nanking Road side of the narrow lounge, hurdling overturned tea tables, chairs and prostrate forms of guests seeking the safety of the floor. Through the gaping windows on the Nanking Road I could see at least 50 persons writhing on the sidewalk and roadway. Three foreigners were trying to crawl over the bodies of dead Chinese. . . .

"Out on the street I saw a white woman crouched in the middle of Nanking Road, assisting her daughter in giving birth to a child, while a hail of death pelted from the skies. . . . Ambulance attendants pawed over bleeding figures in the street, selecting only those who had a chance to live."

Over a mile away other bombs whistled down on the corner of the Avenue Edward VII and Thibet Road in the French Concession where stands an amusement park, the "Great World." This, last week, was jampacked with Chinese refugees. A bomb landed smack in the middle of them, killed 450, wounded 800. Passing in the street were Dr. Frank J. Rawlinson, veteran U. S. Missionary, and Motorcar Salesman H. S. Honigsberg and his Russian wife. All three were killed. Dr. Robert Karl Reischauer, Princeton University lecturer, acting as a tourist guide for the summer, had his leg torn off in the Palace hotel lobby. He died on his way to the hospital. Death came too, to an Australian-born U. S. barmaid known to Shanghai simply as Dodo Dynamite.

Uninjured by the bombings but a shocked eye-witness was Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Quickly she telegraphed a protest to Mme Chiang Kai-shek with whom she had dined earlier in the week.

Wellesley-educated Mme Chiang is not only one of the most potent political figures in the Orient, but the particular patron of Chinese aviation. She is reputed to O. K. the purchase of every plane personally. Quick to come to the defense of her aviators' shocking bad marksmanship she telegraphed in reply:

"Nobody deplores more than we the terribly tragic accidental bombing by two damaged Northrop planes. ... It is officially confirmed that both pilots were wounded and that [antiaircraft shots] damaged the bomb racks, which caused the bombs to break loose. Both wounded pilots are in Shanghai hospitals. It is incredible that the belief exists in some places that China deliberately bombed the International Settlement. What for?"

If the bombing of the International Settlement was intentional, a good many oldtime residents thought that they knew one explanation: Japan by treaty rights is a member of the International Settlement at Shanghai, whose neutrality is theoreti cally protected by the guns of half-a-dozen foreign powers. During the 1932 siege Japanese warships would calmly attack Chinese Shanghai, then calmly claim sanctuary in the International Settlement, using it as a base and openly landing troops there. China is a bigger, stronger country than she was five years ago and there were signs aplenty last week that she was in no mood to let Japan repeat this particular performance. To protect the International Settlement, there were in Shanghai last week:

1) U. S. Admiral Henry Ervin Yarnell on the cruiser Augusta, flagship of the U. S. Asiatic Fleet of some 40 outmoded destroyers, auxiliaries and spoon-shallow river gunboats; 2) the fourth U. S. Marines, a regiment of 1,050 men, which were reinforced from Manila by week's end; 3) British Vice Admiral Sir Charles Little commanding Britain's China Squadron; 4) nine hundred fifty British regulars, and a battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers hastily ferried over from Hong Kong; 5) about 1,000 small sallow French Indo-Chinese and Annamese soldiers; 6) small detachment of Italian Fascists; 7) the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, a brigade of mixed infantry and cavalry consisting principally of British and U. S. clerks and White Russian emigres.

After the weekend bombings neither Chinese nor Japanese tested the temper of this mixed force further by other invasions of the International Settlement, but hot & heavy the battle waged in Chinese Shanghai. By week's end casualty lists had mounted to 3,500 killed, 10.500 wounded with no appreciable change in the battle lines. A thousand U. S. citizens were promptly evacuated; 2.000 prepared to leave at the first opportunity.

In Peiping to the north last week the Soviet Embassy called for extra guards as protection from one of the most colorful characters in the Far East: onetime Cossack Ataman General Grigoriy Semenov. With the temperament and figure of an old time Greek wrestler, he has made a good living as head of a band of White Russian bravos who, according to rumor, have been doing Japan's dirty work for years in Manchukuo. In 1929 he collected $700,000 in Imperial Russian funds from the Yokohama Specie Bank. Fortnight ago he was reported responsible for a raid on the Soviet consulate in Tientsin. Peiping's alarm was caused by a new report that he was on his way to raid the Soviet's Peiping Embassy.

Meanwhile the only immediate result of the promiscuous slaughter in Shanghai was that Japanese diplomatic and consular offices were ordered evacuated from China's capital, Nanking. No one in Tokyo, however, would admit that this presaged a formal declaration of war, a technical gesture now outmoded because it is apt to lead to international complications and to charges that treaties have been broken.

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