Drive to the South

The greatest campaign of the year in Asia opened last week amid the yellow stubble of South China's rice paddies, just harvested of their bumper crop. At Hengyang the Japanese had won the battle of Hunan. There they had paused for regrouping, to consolidate their supply lines and to rest their troops. Twice in a month they had feinted, first due south toward Canton, next southwest toward Kweilin, site of a major Fourteenth Air Force base. Both times they had halted, not yet certain they had the preponderant strength needed to finish the job.

Now the hesitation was over. The enemy had completed the road south from Changsha to Hengyang; he had made progress in restoring the railway to service, and he had cleared the Siang River of mines. Major General Chennault's airmen had flown their hearts out, bombing and strafing, but to little avail. The Japanese had at least seven well armed, well clad, well supplied divisions in the field. The Chinese had lost most of their artillery at Changsha. They still had foot soldiers galore.

But as one U.S. Army observer grimly commented: "You can't trample the enemy to death."

Encirclement and . . . Nowhere else in the Asiatic or Pacific theaters had the Japs such a large force active in the field against any of the United Nations. The Japs' strategy was sound and tried: encirclement and annihilation. Due west from Hengyang, one column struck swiftly toward Shaoyang; southeast of Hengyang, another struck from captured Leiyang to engulf Changning.

The enemy's intentions were clear and frightening: the second column swung west to Chiyang--in the rear of the Chinese troops which had been massed to check the drive. With almost no motor transport, the Chinese lacked the mobility of the Japs. It was doubtful that they could prevent a junction between the enemy's Shaoyang and Chiyang columns.

The Japs were bound not only for Kweilin, capital of Kwangsi Province, but also for Chenankwan on the French Indo-China border. If they ever got there, East China, with its bases from which Chennault's hard-driven aviators harass the enemy from Shanghai to Formosa to Hainan, would be lost. From such a catastrophe, the Pacific commands of General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz would suffer almost as much as the Chinese.

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