Useless Corridor

As the Japanese withdrew from their hard-won corridor through South China, the Chinese Army, cleaning up scattered resistance, cautiously advanced in their wake. Along a 180-mile front in Kwangsi Province, eager Chinese drew near to prizes they had lost a year ago--the air-base cities of Liuchow and Kweilin. This week TIME Correspondent Theodore H. White, first newsman to enter the recaptured corridor and "visit Nanning, radioed this report:

A trip to Nanning is good for the soul. The primary impression one gets in talking to people here is of the stupid, hollow nature of the great Japanese victories of 1944. Here in Nanning, at the core of the great continental corridor, lies exposed all the futility of what the Japanese tried to do.

The Japs got nothing at all out of the great land route won at such tremendous cost in life and energy; the line that was supposed to form an invulnerable channel from the resources of the South Seas to the arsenals of Manchuria carried during six months' existence not a single ton of rubber or petroleum, not a single important troop movement.

According to all sources here, the Japs used the route for local traffic only. Occasionally troops moved to Liuchow 100 miles north, or Indo-China 100 miles south. But the Fourteenth Air Force kept the roads useless. Frequently the Japs were forced to rely upon files of impressed Chinese coolies, hauling sacks of bullets to the Indo-China garrisons.

Change of Mind. At various Allied headquarters far from Nanning, analysts are now putting together bits of information about Jap plans for the future. Well before the evacuation of Nanning and the abandonment of the corridor, the Japs started continental redispositions. Two new divisions were recently sent to Indo-China, and divisions already there have been brought up to strength with Korean and Formosan replacements. The chewed-up Burmese divisions have been pulled back to Thailand.

But with this defensive hedgehog prepared, the Japs swiftly and without warning cut it loose to shift for itself. The crack Eleventh Japanese Army, which had spearheaded the great East China drive last year, was withdrawn from the connecting corridor. Then the Japs abandoned Nanning: every strategic purpose for which the corridor had been conceived was lost.

Chinese troops entered Nanning at noon the next day, encountered no serious opposition and rapidly moved forces both north and south until they held about 100 miles of the corridor. At present they stand about 20 miles from Liuchow, which will probably fall when the Jap timetable reaches the proper day.

Change of Heart. The night I arrived in the echoing, empty streets of Nanning --which is practically intact--I watched some Chinese troops marching through the town. They were singing--the first time I had heard Chinese troops singing in the field since 1939.

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