Counterpoint

To retaliate for a bombing of Hankow in which U.S. Liberator bombers shot down 35 of 50 intercepting Zeros, the Jap air force last week ordered 47 planes over Chungking to give the Chinese provisional capital its first raid in almost two years. Three times opposed on their way, only about 30 planes reached the Chungking area, where Chinese pilots took them on. Jap bombs fell outside the city limits, did little damage. Reported ex-Drama Critic Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times: "Among the targets most valiantly attacked . . . were rice fields, vegetable gardens, flower gardens, one dammed-up swimming hole, clumps of bamboo, the mud banks of the Chialing River and the middle of the Chialing River itself. If it were not for the presence of the bloody, mangled corpses of Chinese coolies ... it would be a pleasure to describe this raid as a comic triumph of bad marksmanship and general stupidity."

No such description could apply to the work of the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force last week. In three raids, Mitchell bombers with a fighter cover of Warhawks bombed the Kowloon docks, across the bay from Hong Kong, destroyed an estimated 25,000 tons of Jap shipping. In all raids during this period against Jap-held China bases, U.S. planes shot down at least 78 Jap planes, lost only eight.

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