BATTLE OF ASIA: After Five Years

After five years of heart-searing battle, China faced the most serious threat of the war—the beginning of a new Jap campaign to storm her back door.

The Jap had cut the road that was China's lifeline to the fighting wealth of her allies. Now he charged with terrifying speed into the flank of her ragged fighters, defying analysis of his advance by the dazzling multiplicity of his spearheads. The Jap flung his main force in a curiously variegated pattern. Above Lashio, some 100 miles, he branched into two forks, sent one column north to Myitkyina, where he established an air base. Another column swung northeast up the Burma Road.

From China, with footslogging infantry troops and all the rolling forces he could spare, Chiang Kai-shek moved south to meet them. Chiang threw another force into Burma far to the east, by fierce battling kept the Jap on the west side of the turgid Salween River.

But up the Burma Road, behind the south-marching Chinese, another Jap force sprang up. Apparently it had come from Indo-China. Chiang, blinded by lack of reconnaissance, wheeled to meet this attack, too.

Chinese troops died silently, bitterly, in remote spots where history might never note the glory of their end. Lieut. General Joseph W. Stilwell's force, cut off in the bowels of Burma, came out of its position with a rush, jammed into the Jap communication lines above Mandalay and made havoc. Some of the Jap forces swung back to meet him, and there, by a strange cyclic development, Japanese fought toward the south and Chinese toward the north.

What China's Fight Means. While India quivered with the Jap threat to its sinewless, amorphous soul, calm words came from China's headquarters. Reverses there were nothing new, and wherever Chinese and Japanese had met, the Chinese had given good account of themselves. They had even forced the Jap back in some spots in Yunnan Province. But China's undaunted face masked a foreboding soul.

For in China World War II could be lost, just as it could be lost on the Russian front. Major General Lewis Brereton's Air Forces from India could smash destructively at the Jap in the north—as they did—and the R.A.F. could go on raining bombs on the Jap's ports on the Bay of Bengal—as it did. Stilwell could fight his way out. The R.A.F. could batter the German in Europe, turn back the Jap in the Coral Sea. But if the foe struck deep enough into China from the south, if he could pile up enough reverses to erase Chiang, either in battle or by treachery, then ruin would be close. The Jap would have nine-tenths of his New Order in Greater East Asia. It might then take years to knock him out of it.