Push on Honan

The Japanese columns rumbled from their village bases, snaked westward across the knee-high wheat of Honan. Overhead, their aircraft roared on their way to bomb Chinese towns strung out along the Hwang Ho, the River of Sorrow.

Slowly the Chinese units fell back. To the battlewise lao ping, China's G.L, it was clear: he had not the strength to halt the enemy, nor the air support which he enjoyed in the battles in the south. Major General Claire Chennault's Fourteenth had no good bases in the north.

Strategists in Chungking assumed that the new Japanese drive was aimed at ancient Chengchow, tried to guess which of these was the main objective:

P: To give fresh levies from Japan their first sniff of powder;

P: To seize Honan's wheat crop, reputed to be good;

P: To gain control of the Chinese-held stretch of the 775-mile long Peiping-Hankow Railroad. The Chinese had removed the rails and ruined the rail bed, but the ambitious Japanese may hope to rebuild the key line. Then a similar campaign could be launched to the south, to seize the Hankow-Canton railway. A 1,522-mile trunk railroad, spanning China's length from the Yellow to the South China Sea, would be worth a million tons of shipping to Japan.

Tomorrow, Famine. Whatever Japan's goal, she put a lot of muscle behind her drive: perhaps two full divisions (30,000 men), one of them headed by roly-poly, arrogant Lieut. General Seiichi Kita, the mastermind of Japanese political puppetry in North China. Against this force the Chinese could muster a large but poorly armed, undertrained army under a good general, burly Veteran T'ang En-po.

For Honan's people, emaciated after two years of famine, the enemy push held but one promise: another hungry year.

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