Victory Supplied

The only indication in Japan's strictly censored press that the Japanese Army was not faring well in China during the last two months--that it has even suffered defeats at the hands of the Chinese--has been an absence of victory announcements. Last week a badly needed Japanese victory was supplied when twelve Japanese warships, 20 warplanes and a landing party of 1,000 sailors and marines planted the Rising Sun flag on the important, poorly defended island of Amoy, in South China. While the capture of Amoy might mean that the Japanese were preparing for a push in South China to cut off Chiang Kai-shek's munitions route, most observers believed that Japan wanted an easy victory to announce at home and that the restless, jealous Japanese Navy wanted a little glory for itself.

The big crucial battle of the war was still being fought, however, around Suchow, the junction city of the Tientsin-Pukow and the Lunghai Railways in Central China. In that vicinity the Japanese Army, doubled to a strength of 200,000 men in the last two weeks, was getting perilously near to the vital railway, had almost encircled Suchow. While Chinese defenses North of the railway held fast, even Chinese communiques admitted Japanese advances by mobile columns from the South. At week's end the Japanese claimed that one column had cut the railroad at Tangshan, 50 miles west of Suchow. There the Japanese Southern Army hoped to meet the Japanese Northern Army and close the western end of the Lunghai corridor.

The Japanese claimed that the successful closing of the Lunghai corridor's western end would mean that an army of at least 400,000 of Chiang Kai-shek's best soldiers would be bottled up in a narrowing pocket around Suchow, with little chance of escape, with only the alternatives of surrender or annihilation. Since this corridor is at least 100 miles long and never narrower than 45 miles, the Japanese claim was considered optimistic. The effective closing of the long western end of the Lunghai corridor seemed to military experts to be feasible only if Japan sent many thousands more soldiers to the area.

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