Eight-Point Landing

In chess, war or the smash-&-grab of totalitarian diplomacy, the essence of strategy is to make a single move serve more than one offensive purpose. Strategically impeccable, therefore, was Japan's move-of-the-week, landing eight Army columns along a 250-mile strip of South China coast between Hong Kong and the Indo-China border. It was intended: 1) to menace one of free China's best supply lines; 2) to help isolate British Hong Kong; 3) to strengthen the position of the large Japanese garrison on Hainan Island just off the coast; 4) to make a nasty threatening face at Indo-China just across the Gulf of Tonkin.

Easily the most important of these threats was the first. The romantic roller coaster of the Burma Road is China's best-publicized and most spectacular lifeline, but it is desperately vulnerable to air attack. Because a single lucky or well-aimed bomb can back up several days' traffic in no time, Chiang Kaishek's Government has in recent months depended increasingly on the flow of goods through Kwangtung Province, southernmost in China.

The Kwangtung supply line, which the Japanese last week tried to cork up, is no single bombable pathway like the Burma Road. Instead, machinery, materiel and munitions are landed from junks or freighters on beaches at minor ports anywhere along the coast in small shipments, proceed inland through the countryside by a kind of osmosis, in carts or slung on bamboo poles between two coolies. Not until they are well away from the coast are supplies concentrated along the Hengyang (southern Hunan) Railroad that takes them upcountry.

To the Japanese this constant infiltration of supplies has been a Class-A problem, for no kind of raiding could stop it. In January of this year a full 17% of China's imports passed through the railhead at Liuchow, south of Kweilin. These are official figures; by unofficial estimates far more supplies were transshipped there.

But though the strategy of the eight-point landing was sound, Japan had made a tactical error. Opposed to her small landing parties, China had some 200,000 crack troops in the south.

This week, as suddenly as they came, Japanese forces withdrew, communiqueing that they had destroyed "transportation bases." Unofficial reports claimed that they had also captured $2,000,000 worth of supplies. Translated into Chinese, this read that, fleet or no fleet, the outnumbered Japanese had simply been pushed right back into the sea.

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