MANCHURIA: Rout oj Ma

Rout of Ma

Thermometer mercury scrooched down in its tubes, showed 4° below Zero. Across the bleak Manchurian steppes just south of Tsitsihar snowflakes scudded in a driving blizzard that nipped soldiers' noses, soldiers' ears. Well-publicized Chinese General Ma Chan-shan with 23,000 Chinese troops was about to make his heroic last stand against 3,500 prosaic but efficient Japanese soldiers.

On two convenient hills, each some 150 ft. high and admirably placed by Nature behind the fighting lines, stood the respective Chinese and Japanese General Staffs. Somebody had to start the battle. Afterwards, the Japanese Press spokesman accused Chinese soldiers of having begun the fray with "unbearable taunts."

Japanese cavalry were first in the charge. Riding down the Chinese front line they cut a swath into which Japanese infantry poured pell mell, yelling. General Ma's right flank held at first. Chinese cavalry tried to encircle the Japanese right, but Japanese field guns and bombing planes stopped that. A lone Chinese anti-aircraft gun atop an armored car waggled and wobbled, frantically failed to hit even one of six Japanese planes. Nine Chinese field batteries blazed valiantly, but along a five-mile front superior Japanese armament turned the battle's tide. Chinese units broke, fled for their lives across the frozen steppes.

The panting retreaters threw away their rifles, coats, hats, canteens, valuable extra pairs of officers' high boots, to run the faster. In the utter Chinese rout General Ma, who had begun the day by promising " I will fight so long as one Chinese stands by my side!" ended it safely some 30 miles ahead of the main retreat. For the rest of the week he skulked north of the walled City of Tsitsihar which Japanese took as their prize.

At news of her father's defeat, pretty Miss Ma Shu-chin, 19, quit her girls' hoarding school at Tokyo and sailed for Manchuria, serenely confident that the gallant Japanese military would pass her through their lines to General Ma.

''My brother wrote me to come," explained Miss Ma, "and he knows best." Seven other Manchurian schoolgirls sailed home with Ma's daughter.

Bumping along a shell-strewn road near Tsitsihar two days after the battle, Correspondent Frederick Kuh of United Press reported freezing corpses gnawed by carrion, piteous wounded, and short, fat, half-bald Japanese General Jiro Tamon who "punctuated his description of the Japanese victory with derogatory references to the League of Nations" (see col. 2).