Week of Worry

Last week the Chinese High Command in bomb-scarred Chungking had grave new worries. Marshal Chiang Kai-shek's troops have been getting most of their war supplies from the southwest over the Burma Road, from the southeast by night smuggling from Hong Kong--via Chinese junks and coolies' carts--to the free sections of the Canton-Hankow railway. Last week the Japanese were slicing viciously at both supply lines.

Hitherto Japan's attack on the smugglers has been mostly by bombing planes, largely impotent against the scattered traffic in the dark. But early one morning last week Japanese warships and transports steamed out of the mist into Bias Bay, 40 miles north of Hong Kong, landed a force reported at more than 10,000 which promptly began moving inland, covered by bombers, across the smuggling country. Soon they threatened Wai-chow, an important smuggling station, and no strong Chinese opposition arrived.

Chungking admitted last week that transportation on the Burma Road had been seriously disrupted. Shanghai reports said that Burma Road bridges across the winding Mekong River had been bombed to pieces, were piled up as wreckage downstream. Months ago Chinese anti-aircraft guns were foolishly placed high on the rim of the Mekong gorges. Japanese bomber pilots soon learned to swoop below the gun level, bombed the deep-gorge bridges with relative impunity. Later the guns were lowered. Last week it was said that along the Road supply trucks were jammed up by the hundreds--fine bombing targets --waiting for flimsy wooden ferries often unable to float a single truckload.

Threatened with the loss of the Burma Road, Chungking talked of leaning more heavily on the long-way-round supply line that helped greatly when Britain closed the Burma Road last year--the 3,100-mile rail and caravan route from Vladivostok to Chita and Lanchow. But last week Soviet Russia and Japan sat down to negotiate a trade treaty--which might lead to the long-prophesied non-aggression pact and the closing of Vladivostok to supplies for China.

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