Hunting Japanese

In a furious, long-continued action last week, Chinese troops, holding the south bank of the Grand Canal at Hanchwang, where it intersects the railway connecting Peking with Shanghai, not only kept the Japanese from crossing and drove them back again & again to the north bank, but finally stormed across the canal themselves. At Lini, 55 miles to the east, stubborn Chinese defenders still had not yielded the town, although pounded all week by Japanese artillery and bombers.

Since this blocking of the Japanese came two weeks after the Imperial Government launched their big spring offensive to take Suchow, the checkmated Japanese War Machine was so far behind schedule last week as to stand disgraced, particularly since at all times the Japanese have had command of the air. Every Chinese was fit to burst with pride. Over-optimistic Chinese newspapers predicted the Japanese will now be driven back upon Tsinan. One who knows the real situation is Mme Chiang Kaishek, "Wife of 1937," who is at Hong Kong while her husband, Generalissimo Chiang, directs the desperate resistance of China. "The strain on the Generalissimo now is gigantic, almost superhuman," said Mme Chiang last week. "I feel that I must do everything in my power to help him hold up under that strain, because I believe his leadership is vital right now."

Japanese have been striking not only down the Peking-Shanghai line but also down the Peking-Hankow railway, and last week the war was going great guns in the U-shaped area these roads make with "China's Hindenburg Line." This is not a closely coordinated system of defenses like the French Maginot Line, but over a period of years the Chinese have built important numbers of cement pillbox forts in a sausage-shaped area. This is traversed by the curiously named Lung-hai Railway, so called because it starts from the sea at Haichow and penetrates far inland toward Lung mountain in Kansu, forming today the sole rail link down which Soviet munitions are brought to aid China. Chinese troops held towns far on the other side of the Hindenburg Line, and Chinese Communist forces were operating in Hopeh last week with such success that at times the Japanese lost briefly towns and villages along their main rail lines of supply & conquest. Impudent, chuckling, the Chinese Communist Yu Cheng-tsao cracked that his bands are hunting Japanese in a "Communist State" just formed by "7,000,000 Chinese farmers" in Hopeh.

In the whole Shantung-Honan-Hopeh area the Japanese last week were showing none of the decisive "punch" to which harried Chinese have become resigned at Hankow, the capital of Chiang. Spirits were high on the eve of a Kuomintang Congress scheduled for this week to adjust points of difference with the Chinese Communists. Of China and Japan able Chicago Daily Newsman A. T. Steele flashed from Hankow: "Each side believes that the other is on the brink of an internal breakdown, but each is dead wrong as far as the immediate future is concerned. .... The Government here is scarcely recognizable as the same crowd of officials who fled Nanking in confusion last fall."

While Hankow thus bubbled with confidence, Japanese installed at Nanking last week yet another Chinese Government, composed of the merest puppets. Chinese whose names mean almost as little to the Chinese people as Joe Zilch. This outfit, as the Japanese put it, will be "under the umbrella" of Nanking. The business community in Shanghai, both foreign and Chinese, exhibited no sympathy but much relief that there is now a Nanking Government which will get paralyzed currency exchanges going again. Last week the currency situation was such a desperate muddle that a few days after the native dollar was quoted at 330 per $100 U. S. it was being quoted at 450--a catastrophic fall. Japan's puppet Chinese regimes in Manchukuo, Peking and Nanking will now cooperate in striving to make Japanese-controlled China's present economic chaos a trifle less chaotic, but the Japanese efforts will probably meet smart sabotage from Hankow's T. V. Soong, "China's Smartest Banker."

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