Puppets United

The Rising Sun flag floated last week over still burning, partially destroyed Suchow, strategic railroad junction of Central China. Japanese trucks, tanks, soldiers were in possession of the streets. To the Mikado's men the capture of Suchow meant the end of a five-months-old, bitterly waged campaign and the beginning of a new offensive toward another junction city, Chengchow, west of Suchow where the Lunghai and the Peking-Hankow Railways meet. The Japanese were obviously beginning a great new encircling movement under the direction of the North China Commander-in-Chief General Count Juichi Terauchi, who flew down from his northern base to see Suchow fall.

Japan's military spokesmen in Shanghai declared that 250,000 confused, ill-armed, uncommanded-troops were hopelessly trapped in the Suchow area. At Hankow, China's temporary capital, Chinese commanders were more optimistic, said their best troops had withdrawn, claimed recapture of two towns, announced that they were engaged upon a little encircling themselves. The entire length of the 630-mile Tientsin-Pukow Railway is now nominally under Japanese control, although the Japanese will have to operate it against ceaseless Chinese guerilla attacks. For Japan's political administrators in China the victory means that Chinese puppets of Japanese-controlled Nanking and Peking can at last be united under one big puppet Government.

*Reported last week in Hankow was the success of Japanese efforts to have Germany, as Japan's anti-Communist ally, order the recall of General Baron Alexander von Falkenhausen and his staff of 40 German military men who have long been "personal" advisers to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

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