"Shoulders To the Mat"

The Japanese drive against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek last week reached a point only 95 miles down the Yangtze from his headquarters at Hankow. There the Japanese were hampered chiefly by a few bursted dikes ("Dynamited by the Chinese!" snarled the enraged invaders).

Meanwhile, the most graphic dispatch of the week from a very meagrely reported war came from the province of Hopeh, a fertile plain lying almost entirely north of the Yellow River, 550 miles from the main theatre of operations.

In Hopeh, an Associated Press correspondent interviewed the talented Chinese guerrilla leader, General Lu Cheng-tsao.

Japanese have nominally occupied all Hopeh for eight months, its eastern quarter for nearly three years. General Lu's description of conditions behind the Japanese lines, allowing for natural partisan distortion, was the more significant because the Japanese are now apparently reducing their forces in that area in order to send reinforcements to the threatened Manchukuoan border (see col. 1). He said: "Our central Hopeh forces now control 8,000 square miles of territory--about the size of Massachusetts--sandwiched between the railways south of Peiping and Tientsin.

"We are surrounded by the Japanese, but we have organized among the 12,000,000 people in our area a mass hatred of the Japanese Army, hammered home daily by orators, dramatic troupes, atrocity posters, village newspapers and in 4,200 primary schools. Politically we already have Japan with both shoulders to the mat.

"The Japanese have made the Peiping-Hankow Railway a fortified zone, with every station an impregnable castle of sandbags and with hundreds of pillboxes between the stations. We guerrillas cannot capture a station without suffering heavy casualties.

"Meanwhile, the Japanese are finding it extremely difficult to penetrate our territory between the railways because we have destroyed all the motor roads and our guerrillas are on guard within ten miles of every railway station. Both armies are now searching for new tactics.

"The Japanese cannot starve us out of this area. We have eradicated 70% of the cotton crop and substituted wheat, and this has resulted in the biggest wheat crop that the province ever has had.

"So long as we hold all the land between the railways the Japanese can get no taxes, no food supplies, no minerals, no cotton. They will have no profit to show for their expensive conquest."

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