Lost Optimism

"No optimistic view of the future is warranted," said Foreign Minister Koki Hirota in Tokyo last week in a warning to the Japanese people to "prepare for possible extreme personal financial sacrifices."

Returning to Japan from his naval command in Chinese waters, Vice Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa, whom the confident Japanese expected to announce new victories, tersely remarked: "The war is only half over!"

As a final indication of how serious a turn--for Japan--the ten-months-old undeclared Chinese-Japanese War has taken, Premier Prince Fumimaro Konoye partly invoked the much debated, bitterly opposed National Mobilization Act, providing for immediate mobilization of Japanese man power and resources. When this bill was passed in March, Prince Konoye placated Japanese political parties by promising that the act would be implemented only in case of emergency.

News trickling through from neutral and Chinese sources gave reasons for this Japanese loss of optimism and growing sense of desperate action. Although no clear-cut Chinese victory, such as the Taierhchwang capture last month, could be announced, Chinese forces gave every indication of unprecedented, coordinated military action in a series of minor successes throughout virtually the entire war area.

The main battle of the war last week was still being fought northeast of Suchow, from 15 to 50 miles north of the eastern end of the Lunghai Railway. Into an area more than half the size of Long Island, General Li Tsung-jen, commander-in-chief of the Fifth War Area, had poured about 650,000 Chinese soldiers for what six months ago would have been a real anomaly--a Chinese offensive. Opposing them were 100,000 well-trained, well-armed Japanese troops.

No frontal advance on Japanese entrenched positions was ordered by General Li Tsung-jen, but rather a series of sweeping side attacks, each more intense than the other, each spaced to give the Japanese scant time to recuperate from the last. The Chinese general hoped by these tactics to wear down the Japanese forces so that a general retreat would be ordered.

Coordinated with the Chinese offensive was a far-flung guerilla warfare rivaling any irregular fighting for scope and intensity yet experienced in modern times. No part of presumably conquered Chinese territory seemed to be free from the guerillas. The Nanking-Shanghai area, well within Japanese lines, was declared unsafe. At Taiping, between Nanking and Wuhu, Chinese bands infiltrated into the city and fought the small Japanese garrison in the streets. Just north of Shanghai, almost due east of Nanking, at Tungchow, the none-too-modest Japanese communiques claimed their only major success of the week--the de-feat of 10,000 Chinese attempting to cut off this important base from other Japanese-controlled points.

Peking citizens woke up one morning to the sound of artillery and airplane bombing twelve miles away. Panicky Chinese puppets hid while the Japanese military closed the city's gates, mounted machine guns on walls. With a huge force of Red General Chu Teh's Communist army in Peking's outskirts, the Japanese feared a sympathetic uprising within the city itself. Guards ink-stamped the wrists of all Chinese entering Peking to identify them in case of an uprising, even made sure that incoming coffins contained dead, not live, persons. For the second time within two months the important Peking-Tientsin line was menaced and a railway bridge across the Liuli River on the Peking-Hankow Railway was bombed.

With the Japanese claiming only that Chinese attacks have been repulsed, foreign military observers believed that the Japanese military machine had again been stalled and that, even if Chinese successes had been exaggerated, at least a stalemate --tantamount to defeat for the Japanese --had developed.

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