Mr. Lin Learns About Life

A "visitor in Chungking for the last bomb-cracked month has been Lin Yu-tang, whose interpretations of China to the West (My Country and My People, The Importance of Living) once offended high Chinese officials because they were so honest. Slight, middle-aged but boyish, quick to smile, master of four languages and scores of moods, he is China's philosophic Ambassador at Large.

One day last week Lin Yutang, tired from two nights in & out of dugouts, heard an alarm and again made his way to one of the vast caverns cut into the sides of Chungking's red-and-grey sandstone mountain. There he sat hunched up from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. At one point two bombs landed directly above the dugout's 70-foot rock roof, three in front of its plugged entrance. The place shook for 15 seconds, and concussion-wind rushed through it, blacking out the oil lamps.

By evening Lin Yutang had learned that from the point of view of destruction this was probably the worst raid Chungking had ever suffered. A huge swath of fire raged through the city's most crowded sector. Next morning Author Lin took a walk. He saw 10,000 homes burned or blasted; he saw people sleeping in the streets; and when he also saw a potter setting out his wares for sale he was amazed at the display, not of porcelain but of nerves. That afternoon the bombers returned, gutted the business district, including many foreign offices. The big Changanszu (General's Temple) was cut to the ground except for a statue of Buddha sitting on his fat haunches and smiling among the cracked bricks.

As Author Lin left Chungking for the U. S. he was impressed by the efficiency as well as the brutality of the Japanese Air Force. In three years it had learned plenty: how to organize mass flights in tight formations which concentrate defensive fire, how to fly in to the objective from different directions and at different levels, a little bit about how to aim--from 10,000 feet the Japanese can now hit the rock of Chungking (about five square miles) with scarcely any spills into the embracing rivers.

Planes have also improved. The best types are mostly license-built from foreign designs: Heinkel 113 (385 m.p.h.), a heavy Junkers (155 m.p.h. with 2,200-lb bomb-load), the Nakajima I (Boeing-type bomber); and as fighters Devoitine 510 and Nakajima C-98 (352 m.p.h.). Japan has about 1,000 planes in China (400 fighters, 300 observation, 300 bombers) and about 5,800 altogether (2,350 fighters, 1,900 observation and transport, 1,550 bombers). About 2,100 military pilots and 1,000 civilian pilots are trained every year. Contrary to the old canard about Japanese pilots not being able to see as far as the lenses of their glasses, Army and Navy fliers are perfect physical specimens and blindly, unimaginatively brave. The Japanese Naval Air arm is far superior to the Army's, whose flights can usually be identified by their ragged formations and poor aim.

The big difference between air war in Europe and in China is that the Japanese have concentrated their entire fury on one tiny target, Chungking (with only occasional forays to towns like Chengtu, Kweilin, Kunming, Lanchow). If the courage of the British, who last week estimated that during the war 7,000 bombs had fallen on all England, is praiseworthy, that of the citizens of Chungking, whose little rock has shed bombs by the tens of thousands, is almost unbelievable. Said Lin Yutang last week: "If the Japanese can dish it out, we can take it."

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