New Phase

After extensive travels in North China, the Japanese War Minister General Hajima Sugiyama returned to Tokyo last week and obviously it was time to review the war (see map), now about to enter a fresh, perhaps final phase. Japanese Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye admitted last week that his Cabinet has been split for months on the question of whether the Empire's best policy is merely to keep trying to hold and digest what Japan has gained or instead make supreme efforts to chase Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, who lost his Capital Nanking four months ago, out of Hankow, and then out of Chungking, and then off into Sinkiang.

In authoritative Tokyo quarters last week it was reported that the War Minister, having surveyed the China War in person, will recommend an immediate supreme Japanese effort to take Hankow, will probably carry the Japanese Cabinet with him into this bold of rash policy. General Sugiyama was said to be impressed with the historical concept "Hankow is the Military Heart of China," to have convinced himself that once this "heart" is in Japanese hands it will be impossible for the Chinese to keep up organized resistance. With the fall of Hankow, the Japanese would not merely have taken another "Chinese Capital." They would have seized the rail head of the Canton-Hankow line up which has been coming much the greater portion of all munitions the Chinese have been able to get.

Shantung Campaign. The historic first defeat in modern times of a major Japanese force, when Chinese fortnight ago drove the invaders out of Taierhchwang and chased them 20 miles back into Yihsien, brought down overwhelming Japanese reinforcements from Tsinan and Tsingtao last week. These raised the siege of Yihsien, from which 20,000 Chinese retreated, and approximately 150,000 Japanese effectives were said to face perhaps 400,000 Chinese along the broad "Chinese Hindenburg Line" paralleling the Lunghai Railway. Greatly alarmed, responsible Chinese newsorgans editorialized last week "Suchow is our Verdun," admitted that if Suchow is taken by the Japanese they will have a stranglehold on North Central China, gravely menacing Hankow.

Neutral observers and hydraulic engineers in China were appalled by reports that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was debating whether to create a supreme diversion by ordering dynamited the principal dikes of the Yellow River, famed for ages as "China's Sorrow," upon which the American Red Cross alone has spent over $1,000,000 for flood control and famine relief in this area. Such dynamiting, experts warned, would inundate lands now inhabited by 40,000,000 Chinese and, while it would engulf large Japanese forces, might well rank as the greatest man-made catastrophe in history.

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