On To Chicago

Already in Japanese hands are China's Boston (Peking), New York (Shanghai) and Washington (Nanking). Last week the Japanese pressed forward in a renewed drive to add China's Chicago (Hankow) to the collection. Capture of Hankow, temporary operating headquarters of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Government since the fall of Nanking five months ago, would not complete the process of dismembering China but would leave the Chinese only a fraction of what was once their nation. In the Yangtze Valley, main trade stem of central China, industrial Hankow is second only to Shanghai. Into Hankow daily roll trainloads of supplies, munitions from China's New Orleans (Canton), planeloads and motorcades of vital arms and materials from Russia through Sovietized Outer Mongolia (China's Pacific Northwest).

Japanese forces last week made their main push along the strategic Lunghai east-west railroad, which at Chengchow connects with the Peking-Hankow line (see map). Fortnight ago, retreating Chinese turned and drove an advance column of 10,000 Japanese, under famed little Lieutenant General Kenji Doihara, "Lawrence of Manchuria," into a bottleneck area between the broad Yellow River and the railway. For nine days Chinese forces, often behind providential screens of swirling yellow dust, charged at the Japanese ranks, attempted to wipe out the 10,000. Finally Japanese reinforcements forded the river from the north under artillery bombardment, helped Japan's "Lawrence" pull the cork out of the bottle.

Some 200,000 of China's central army's best-equipped troops backed slowly westward along the railway all week, allowing Lanfeng and Kaifeng to fall, finally holed up in Chengchow, and at week's end Japanese bombers hammered at the city. Japanese shock troops pressed at its sides. Capture of Chengchow would enable the Japanese to right-angle down 300 miles of railway to Hankow. Only serious obstacle in their path will be the Chinese defense fortifications in the southern Honan mountains near Sinyang. Meanwhile, two Japanese forces pushing from the Nanking area to Hankow, one paralleling the swollen Yangtze, the other striking overland through southern Anhwei Province, last week were bogged down by heavy rains, inefficient transport. After a long silence, small Japanese warships shelled towns on the Yangtze some 60 miles upriver from Wuhu, leading observers to believe that they would take advantage of the high waters to push on up to shell Hankow, 200 miles away.

In Hankow last week, nervous Government officials, believing the city's fall a matter of weeks, packed their families off to remote cities in southwestern China, started shipping Government archives and nonessential equipment to Chungking, officially the seat of the Government. Kweiyang, in Kweichow Province, and Yiin-nanfu, capital of Yunnan, only 400 miles from the Tibetan frontier.

While Japanese planes have rained tons of bombs on Canton the past fortnight (see p. 77), Chinese confined their long-range air activities to bloodless raids on Japan. One night last week air-raid sirens screamed, lights were blacked out all over Kyushu Island, at the southwestern end of the Japanese group, as enemy bombers roared overhead. Apparently designed to test the vulnerability of Japan's defenses or to stir anxiety among the Japanese, the raid ended without a bomb being dropped. Three weeks ago a squadron of U. S.-made Martin bombers, piloted by Chinese, took off from Hankow, made a 12,000-mile round trip to Kyushu Island. Over industrial Nagasaki, Kyushu Port and Japan's naval base at Sasebo. the flyers released bales of leaflets urging the Japanese people to throw off their military domination, responsible for the invasion of China.

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