The Army Nobody Knows

(See Cover)

World War II's biggest front, its oldest battle, its hugest protagonist are unknowns. Since May 8 the Japanese have been pushing against the Northern China Front, in an important feeler operation involving about six Japanese divisions. To an unknowing world it is a vast battle in the dark and yet few zones of operation are more important to the London-Washington Axis.

Japan's Army of good field commanders, indifferent staff officers and middling materiel has not lacked publicity. China's Army is the army nobody knows. The world at large does not know it, because the small corps of foreign correspondents in China feel they must stick close to big cities to get big stories. Chinese politicians are ignorant of the war front because they consider their job to be in Chungking. The war front is days away from Chungking except by plane, and China has no planes to spare for junkets. Even foreign military observers almost never get to the front, and send home distilled views of the war.

China's Army lies, and has lain for nearly two and a half years, on a tortured 2,000-mile chain of fronts from the Yellow River to the upper end of the Burma Road. The history of that chain of fronts is unique and anachronistic in World War II--there for 30 weary months has been positional warfare. China's foremost philosopher-apologist, Lin Yutang, wrote last week: "If Japan was able to report gains almost every month, why is it that in the last two and a half years Japan has made a total advance of not more than 250 miles, and then only at two points?"

The reason why Japan has failed is that China is just too big. No country in the world has such a manpower pool. China has some 300 divisions totaling over 3,000,000 men (about equal the German Army's man power).* The Japanese have gone about as far as 800,000 men can when they try to occupy 2,900,000 square miles, nearly the area of the U.S. China's population, which contributes in many primitive ways to the nation's war effort, is one-fifth of the whole world's peoples.

The only concepts which are as staggering as these vastnesses are China's material lacks. Her huge Army has become expert despite a most appalling want of arms and ammunition. China's total copper output is now less than 3,000 tons a year. She puts out less than 100,000 tons of finished steel,/- In a single ten-day bombardment on a single ten-mile front in World War I, at Passchendaele, 88,000 tons of copper and steel were flung around.

But to make up for its lacks, China's unknown Army has numbers, know-how and morale. Its spirit is unmatched in Chinese history. It has a bitter determination which no army in the world of 1941 can exactly match. If & when someone delivers China's soldiers the goods, they are sure that they will be able to finish the job.

The Front. A bag of rice--one of many --was loaded one night last week on a drab, shallow-draft river steamer on the Yangtze River at Chungking. The boat cast off its moorings and rushed downstream on the treacherous current. About 250 miles downstream the terrain suddenly seemed to explode: the river became a narrow torrent, the hills convulsed into forbidding mountains.

Farther on, the rice was shifted to a small chugging steam launch. Skillfully hidden in crevasses along the last stretches of these gorges were machine-gun nests; the valleys leading back from the river were tangled with barbed wire. On strategic crests stood concrete pillboxes; here & there were emplacements ready for artillery. But there was no artillery.

As Ichang neared, the bag of rice was shifted again to a duck-bottomed little junk. Five miles and one river bend above Ichang (the high-water mark of Japanese penetration) the junk ran onto the bank, and the bag of rice was loaded on a coolie's back. The coolie, who carried the rice up a wire-tangled gully toward Divisional H.Q., could hear the boom of artillery. But it was not Chinese artillery.

The coolie hurried through a little hill-squeezed village which at the moment housed D.H.Q., toward the front, up slippery footpaths to a regimental headquarters and then to a battalion headquarters. At each H.Q. he stopped to rest, overheard the officers inside their dugouts discussing great battles and whose fault it was. When the coolie moved on he climbed successive hills, on each of which he saw the great prepared scars where field guns were supposed to be. But there was no artillery.

At the crest of the final hill, the coolie could see the entire Ichang Front. All around him were the Chinese strong points: machine-gun posts supported by trenched rifle pits. Farther down were lines of trenches skillfully disguised by green branches, banks of sod, transplanted wheat; odoriferous dugouts in which odoriferous soldiers huddled 24 hours a day; then bamboo and wooden barricades and mine traps; and finally 200 yards of no man's land. Beyond were the Japanese lines--barbed wire, solidly barricaded trenches, concrete emplacements. The whole scene was intimately still--so still that the coolie could hear bees buzzing in the fields; except every few minutes when a flash and a roar came from the Japanese rear. This was Japanese artillery.

HiD. The bag of rice eventually found its divided way, by daily rations of a pound and a half of rice per man, into the stomachs of the finest troops in China. For the men in these trenches and dugouts were members of HiD--the Honor ary First Division of China's Central Government Armies. This division is the only one of China's some 300 divisions to be awarded the designation Honorary. Over 70% of its men have been wounded in action and have returned; most have been shifted from other crack divisions into this super-crack division. HiD and the other divisions of the Sixth War Area (see map, p. 25) are the bailiwick of brilliant Chen Cheng, who is Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's favorite general.

Paradoxically the Sixth War Area is the quietest front in China, and yet the most important front in China. It is important because it shields the heart of China; here only the treacherous Yangtze Gorges and the choked terrain around them lie between the Japanese and Chungking, the wartime capital. The front is China's quietest because, on the one hand, China's best divisions and worst terrain have stopped the Japanese, and on the other, China's lack of artillery has to date kept these crack divisions from launching the counteroffensive of which they think they are capable. The closest threat to Chungking is meaningless so long as the Sixth War Area remains deadlocked.

On Three Fronts. The Sixth is one of China's nine War Areas. The Chinese defenses--some of which are as rigid as those of World War I, some as fluid as those of the American Civil War--are divided roughly into three main spheres of action: the Northern Front (First and Second War Areas), where the Chinese have succeeded for the most part in keeping the Japanese contained within the great elbow of the Yellow River; the South Coastal Front (Fourth War Area, and isolated sectors), where the Chinese aim is to prevent the enemy from cutting off China's lines of supply--the Burma Road and coastal smuggling; and the Central Front (Fifth and Sixth War Areas) astraddle the Yangtze. Other War Areas are relatively unimportant.

Whether to try to crack these defenses, which grow stronger every day, is a big debate in the Japanese High Command. Some generals want to concentrate on finishing the war in China, others want to press on to new adventures to the south. Apparently these two groups have been able to agree on three points:

They agree that if Suez falls to the Germans, then the dilemma is resolved; they must move south. They have agreed that Japan's best troops, the Konoye Division of the Imperial Guards and the Ever-Victorious Fifth Division, an elite force which claims an unbroken string of successes dating back to the Russo-Japanese War, should be stationed in Indo China: from there they can hop off north to sever the Burma Road or south toward Singapore. The two Japanese Army factions also agree that it serves both ends to deter Chinese trafficking in arms by large-scale raids along the South China coast. These raids hurry a few miles inland and retire whenever Chinese resist ance develops. Last week three such raids were in progress near Ningpo, Foochow, Canton.

The man around whom the China-or-south dilemma revolves is the Japanese Chief of Staff Lieut. General Seishiro Itagaki, who is due to retire in August. He is said to dream of putting on one last master campaign to try to end the China War before he retires--a man who succeed ed in that would be a demigod in Japan.

The surest way to beat China is to take Chungking. The frontal attack, over the dead bodies of General Chen's men and up the dreadful gorges, is the hardest way to do it. More likely is a drive for the Burma Road and a drive south from the Shansi Front--a titanic pincers movement.

The biggest battle of the War in China so far this year has proved that General Itagaki's dream is a pipe dream unless the Japanese are willing to put many more men into the field. The Japanese, attempting to drive south across the Yellow River, succeeded in splitting the Chinese front in two above the river, and in establishing ferry heads on the river itself.

The Japanese hoped then to curl back to east and west, encircle and crush the two Chinese halves. But the Chinese struck north along the flanks of the Japanese salient and threatened to encircle the would-be encirclers. The Communist guerrillas, whose inaction in their areas behind the Japanese lines had contributed to the initial Japanese success, began to fight.

By last week Japanese communications were sufficiently harassed so that the imitative invaders resorted to dropping supplies and ammunition by parachute, a la Crete. The Japanese announced that troops had been withdrawn, "the military objectives having been achieved"--the familiar Japanese formula of frustration.

Command. On July 7 this sputtering, sprawling War in China will be four years old. Four years of war have hurt China a lot, but have also taught China a lot. The most spectacular discovery, for a nation in which military leadership has classically been an affair of coin and cunning rather than martial skill, has been that China could turn out first-class officer talent.

There is no younger officer class in the world than that of the Generalissimo's crack divisions. Generalissimo Chiang is 53, Chen Cheng is 41, Chen's Field Chief of Staff is 34. It would be hard to find a divisional or regimental commander in those divisions over 40. Regimental colonels are sometimes in their 20s.

These baby officers are tough babies. They are trim as well-kept guns, big fellows, by Chinese standards, hearty and jolly in rest and brutally energetic in action. They lead in person. With their divisions they clamber up mountainsides which would put most corpulent U.S. colonels hors de combat. In nearly four years of fighting, the young officers have mastered the arts of the field--silent de ployment, timely retreat, sudden concentration, plausible ambuscade, dependable supply of vegetable camouflage. Lacking artillery, they still know when and how they ought to use artillery.

One art these young officers have developed to its highest point is the skillful use of great superiority in numbers to compensate for shortages of equipment. The keen-weaponed spearheads of Japanese attacks are allowed to drive into the Chinese mass. Then the mass of Chinese gradually not only envelops the spearhead, but harrasses its support and its supply lines. This sort of tactic might have bothered the Germans in France if the Germans had had to cope with so immense a battlefield, with such campaign-wise veterans as the Chinese, and with an enemy outnumbering them three or four to one.

Politically China's young officers are naive; spiritually they are the ultimate sophisticates. They protest that they are democratic, because democracy was one of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles, and the Army, more than Chungking, mouths the words of China's George Washington. They love the U.S. because they believe that the U.S. will send them big guns. However, they tend to sympathize with the rigid social codes of Totalitaria, specifically with those of militarily successful Germany.

But they superimpose upon this framework of discipline a gentle mysticism which officers almost nowhere else do. Chen Cheng's Sixth War Area second-in-command sometimes stands on a hill in the moonlight with visitors and recites the liquid verses of the early 8th-Century Poet Li Po. A general commanding one of the crucial fortifications of the Gorges paints delicate drawings of birds and flowers.

These fine young officers are the product of two institutions. In the early years of the republic, Paoting Military Academy turned out eight classes of men who helped implement the revolution of Sun Yat-sen and who now command about one-third of China's 300-odd divisions. In 1924 the Whampoa Academy was founded under the direction of Chiang Kaishek. Its classes became the elite of Chiang's armies. They now command more than half of the divisions.

Chen Cheng had the good political fortune to graduate in the last class at Paoting and teach the first class at Wham poa.

Little Brother. Chen Cheng is certainly a favorite. He is the only one of Chiang Kai-shek's generals whom the Generalissimo addresses by the Chinese diminutive, ti, "little brother." He rivals much-talked-of General Hu Tsung-nan, leader of the influential "Whampoa Clique," as candidate to succeed the Generalissimo. He and Hu are the only two generals who are permitted to receive orders direct from the Generalissimo without the countersignature of politically powerful Minister for War Ho Ying-chin.

General Chen is a favorite partly because he has curried favor. He is one of China's most political and ambitious generals. He hitched his wagon to Chiang's star at Whampoa, has been riding high ever since. After his rise to public fame in Chiang's northern campaign of 1926, he divorced his wife and the Generalissimo arranged for him to marry the daughter of Tan Yen-kai, soon afterward Premier of China.

But Chen Cheng is also a skillful soldier. The measure of his talent is that the Generalissimo chose him to defend the Gorges --which means defending Chungking, which means defending Chiang. Last summer, when Ichang fell, Chen Cheng was blamed by some for the bad strategy which lost that key city. He then gave up his comfortable job in Chungking as Chief of the Army's Political Training Department and went to the front, publicly vowing not to return until he had retaken Ichang.

Chen's Men. If Chen undertakes an offensive without more guns it will be because his troops could not possibly have more guts. China's best troops belie all the old saws about Chinese cowardice and indifference. They are husky, shaven-pated sons of the soil who, when they must, storm concrete casemates with nothing but hand grenades, who like better than anything else to close with the Japanese hand to hand.

Chinese troops have an added kind of courage: that of endurance. When food is short they can live for months on a pound of rice per day--a diet that will not much more than keep a man alive. They live through bitter winters in sleazy, padded cotton uniforms which incubate the louse and shelter all manner of odors. Most have no shoes, but they can march 40 miles a day when pressed. They exist on the equivalent of 65 U.S. cents a month, nearly half of which they have to pay for mess expenses. Furthermore, they endure endless defeat and disappointment without losing their sullen determination.

Their determination is to drive the Japanese off the soil that they and their fathers have tilled for milenniums. But as the war spreads to other corners of the earth, their struggle has become part of a bigger struggle. The defensive strategy of China dovetails with the defensive strategy of Britain and the U.S. Without realizing it, the embattled farmers of China have become allies of the fighting shopkeepers of the British Empire. If Suez should fall, the Chinese farmers would probably find their enemies turning to attack the Indies. If the Yangtze Gorges should fall, the defenders of the Middle East would soon feel the pressure of the victorious Japanese on their supply lines.

As for the U.S., a large-scale Chinese success would ease the future tremendously. The Chinese officers of the line think they could achieve that success, if only they had some artillery, and some scouting planes to go with it. They think they have learned a few things about how to fight a 20th-century war. But they are still forced to fight an 18th-Century war without even having the 18th-Century weapon, artillery.

*China's Communist Armies do not now fight in the lines beside Government troops, but operate as guerrillas behind the Japanese lines. The Communists have three super divisions of 40,000 each and some 250,000 irregulars.

/- U.S. production in 1940: 66,500,000 net tons.

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