World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ASIA: Disaster Unalloyed?

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Hiding by day, riding by night, the Japanese last week ground out new and ominous gains in their China offensive—the greatest land campaign ever fought by the men from the little island empire. Although the nearest battlefield was almost 350 miles from Chungking, the atmosphere in the capital was heavy with disaster. The Jap drive was a new and terrible threat to the very heart of Free China, the stronghold area lying in a quadrilateral between Chengtu, Chungking, Kweiyang and Kunming.

The enemy was not attempting a Blitzkrieg. Rather his strangling assault was a slow, ponderous, Montgomeryesque offensive which wound up laboriously, smashed ahead for carefully calculated distances with irresistible force, then paused to crank up again for the next lunge.

The enemy moved little over main roads; these were still being ripped by "the few" of Major General Chennault's air force. Instead, he wormed ahead on footpaths between the yellow-stubbled nee fields, on mule trails through the hills, and—most of all—on the rivers, by sampans which could hide in daylight along banks overhung by trees.

Even in the main corridor, from Yochow and Hankow, through Changsha and Hengyang, down which the enemy was funneling his attack groups and supplies, he was subject to harassment by Chinese guerrilla bands. But these attacks were pinpricks against the flank of an armored monster.

Scorched Airfields. In skillfully coordinated pincers drives the Japanese sent a powerful column from Canton up the West River. With their garrison divisions leavened by 20,000 freshly landed reinforcements, the Japs made good time, taking Wuchow and pressing on to Tan-chuk, most important of the Fourteenth Air Force bases southeast of the Heng-yang-Nanning line. Like the great U.S. base at Kweilin, built by the hand labor of thousands of Chinese, Tanchuk was scorched by Chennault's airmen before they left it.

Meanwhile, the northern arm of the pincers thrust out three fingers to grasp Kweilin itself. To the Chinese its loss seemed inevitable. Far more disturbing now was a new threat to another of the Fourteenth's bases; the Japs seemed headed for Liuchow, 100 miles southwest of Kweilin.

But gravest of all was the threat of the western finger, resting on Paoching and pointing across the Kweichow plateau to the Fourteenth's great central bases at Kweiyang and Kunming.

Even if the Japanese should push westward only to Kweiyang, 300 miles from Paoching, they would sever the main highways by which the Chinese and their allies had hoped to move war supplies into China from the new Ledo-Burma Road, through Kunming to Chungking. Across the plateau to the highways wove countless secondary roads and paths, along which the Japs had learned to route their advance.

The Great Trek Resumed. On all these roads and paths last week, millions of China's sorely beset coolies, tradespeople and artisans poured westward, seeking the safety which for so many years has eluded them like a mirage. China's exhausted, tattered soldiers fingered their last handfuls of cartridges, momentarily expecting attack by enemy patrols. Red-eyed, grimy American ground crewmen worked around the clock to keep Chennault's planes flying.