Japan Digs In

Japan knows what it is fighting for--and with, and against. Consequently, Japan is fighting total war in China and Burma. Japan's fighting, in sharp distinction to the purely military efforts and plans of the Allies for that area, is not only military, but economic and political as well.

News of this total warfare has not been kept from the U.S. people. But it has reached them in such isolated and shapeless gobbets, and it has been so blurred by emotionally colored dispatches from Free China, that only the jigsaw pieces have been visible, and not their whole picture. That picture indicates that the Japanese are more successful than is generally thought.

Late in February, a Japanese spokesman announced that Japan was about to open an all-out drive for the destruction of the Chungking regime. Since then there have been military actions scattered all over China (see map). Militarily they have not been on a scale worthy of the spokesman's threat. But taken in their context of attrition, both political and economic, they add up to a real danger.

The danger: their total effect may put Japan in a position of great defensive strength in the Burma-China theater before the Allies' present world strategy will permit strong blows at Japan.

Seeds and Dikes. The most important battles of the last month have been in the lake country of central China (see map inset). Along the meandering Yangtze, in the flatlands between Shasi and Yochow, the Japanese threw an eight-pronged drive southward toward huge, dike-bound Tungting Lake. Using perhaps 40,000 troops and plenty of aircraft, the Japanese quickly overran the area between river and lake.

Then, just as quickly and to the tune of triumphant Chungking communiques, they drew back again, holding the important lakehead town of Hwa-jung (pronounced hwa-roong). The Chinese mounted diversionary attacks farther north, on the line between Ichang and Anlu.

The importance of this quick campaign was not military. The importance lay in the timing. The campaign seriously interfered with the spring plantings of rice and cotton in one of China's too-few fertile basins. Most significant act of the hit-&-run attackers was their blasting of the dikes of Tungting Lake, flooding a huge area west of the lake. China has a phrase to express the futility of invading a land where the invader is allowed to pass and then is swallowed up: "plowing water." The Japanese at Tungting Lake lent the phrase a sinister new meaning.

The campaign also: 1) compelled the planeless, cannonless Chinese to use up some of their infantry reserves; 2) cut into one of the areas where smuggling of goods from Occupied to Free China has been most rife.

Leaks and Arms. Other recent Japanese campaigns in China have had similar objectives. The occupation of Kwangchowan, a French-leased area, gave the Japanese a chance to build airfields to offset U.S.-operated fields in South China, but its main point was to calk the greatest chink in the South China blockade. In Shantung Province, one of the areas occupied by the invader in the first year of the war, the Japanese have in the past two months car ried on a campaign against Chinese guer rilla forces who had assisted in smuggling. Operations against the Chinese border from Burma seemed designed to consolidate Japanese positions on the flank that is most convenient for Allied reentry.

China's Punch. Behind these fronts, Japan is busy. Three weeks ago Premier Tojo paid a flying visit to Puppet Wang Ching-wei in Nanking. There plans were laid for the use of occupied areas as a weight to drag down the free areas. Where as China once used the occupied areas against Japan -- by scorching the earth, by guerrilla interruptions -- Japan will now use the same areas to blockade Free China, to bolster Japan's economy constructively while Free China's economy withers.

Strong political appeals are also madi to the Chinese. Japanese propaganda de clares that the Allies are not fulfilling their promises of aid, that U.S. forces live like kings while Chinese troops grovel like beggars. Whereas the Japanese economic tactic was once plunder, it is now construction and trade. The Japanese armies lash out, not to demolish the Chinese armies, but to scorch Free Chinese earth, as in the Lake District. There are also appeals to the future: whereas the Allies have promised to give up extraterritoriality after the war, Tojo's government announced that on March 30 Japan would give up concessions in Amoy, Hankow, Soochow, Hangchow, Tientsin.

Burma's Judy. In Burma even more is being made of political appeals. Fortnight ago Burma's Puppet Premier Ba Maw visited Tokyo. He was entertained in an annex of Premier Tojo's official residence. He was taken to the Diet, given a banquet, interviewed. And then he was told by Premier Tojo that Japan had set up "the new independent State of Burma."

All this is militarily important. The Japanese won Burma with Burmese help. They know that Burma offers the Allies the easiest land routes to China. They hope to hold Burma the same way they took it. Said Premier Ba Maw: "The entire Burmese people will fight to the last drop of their blood for the successful construction of Greater East Asia."

How Long? How Strong? The Chinese, sensing the potential effectiveness of this insidious campaign, urged loudly last week that the Allies act quickly against Japan. In Chungking the official newspaper Ta Kung Pao recalled that the great Chinese strategist, Sun Tzu, advocated the crushing of the weakest adversary first. The paper asked: "How strong will Japan become in nine months, in one and a half years, or in two and a half years during which the United Nations are concentrating against Hitler?"

The sum total of Japan's efforts in China and Burma suggests that Japan could grow very strong, defensively. Allied strategy was definitely committed to "Hitler first" at Casablanca. All except preliminary and limited campaigns against Japan are thus ruled out for a time. If this policy is to bring victory in the Pacific and Asia, the Allies must conduct their campaigns against Hitler with such energy and efficiency that Japan will not have enough time to grow invincibly strong.

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