Chennault on the Japs

At a mud-walled headquarters on the South China front, Major General Claire Lee Chennault last week gave a succinct review of Japanese air power:

>The Japs use a vast aerial stagger system to guard their empire and train air crews for combat. Freshman flyers go to central China to bomb relatively undefended towns. Then they move by easy stages to Formosa for additional training. In the Canton-Hong Kong area, they next bomb southern China and come up against Chennault's Fourteenth Air Force. The survivors proceed to Thailand and Burma, where they still tangle with the Fourteenth and also with R.A.F. and U.S. airmen based in India. Last stop for those still alive is the Southwest Pacific, where the Japs concentrate their best equipment, their finest airmen.

> The Japs have plenty of planes. Their great difficulty, according to Chennault, is the training of enough men to fly the planes. A secondary bottleneck is aviation fuel. Many a Japanese tanker has gone down under the assault of Allied raiders, and Chennault is praying for enough men and equipment to strike decisively at Japan's sea communications.

> General Chennault is doing the best he can, with the little he has, to whittle down Jap air power in China. Last week he revealed a significant fact. To relieve sorely strained U.S. crews and to make up for the lack of sufficient replacements from the U.S., the Fourteenth is absorbing competent Chinese pilots and crews. The General had personally trained some of them. Said he: "I defy the Japs to tell Chinese from Americans in combat."

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