Bombers or Bustards

Not satisfied with having seen 131 of their bombers and fighters mowed down by an enemy that lost only eight planes, foolhardy Soviet Mongolian aviators again dared to violate Manchukuoan territory one day last week. Over the border they roared, 60 strong; up to meet them climbed three spunky Japanese fighters. Machine guns rattled and sheepherders in the Lake Bor district scurried for shelter as flaming Communist planes filled the sky. In a few minutes it was all over, and a pitiful remnant of the Red raiders was tailing for home.

At least that was the Japanese story. According to other Japanese stories, in the past six weeks 251 Soviet Mongol planes have been shot down on the remote Manchukuoan-Mongolian frontier by numerically inferior Japanese defenders who lost only eleven planes. There was no one to contradict them but the Russians. And contradict them the Russians did. Moscow reported that Soviet Mongol casualties were only 32 planes, far less than the 91 Japanese planes they said they had shot down.

No matter who is winning whatever conflict is now going on on the Mongolian-Manchukuoan border, the credibilities of the world's newspaper readers are taking a terrific beating. No news correspondent has reported the battles, which were so remote and whose results are so impossible to check that they might have taken place on another planet.

This much about the skirmishing is authenticated: Outer Mongolia is a backdoor, not only to China, but to Russian Siberia. If and when the Japanese and Russians decide to fight for keeps, the barren Mongolian plateau will see its biggest battles since the days of Ghengis Khan. In preparation for that day, Russia has declared a virtual protectorate over the Mongol Peoples' Republic, raised a Mongol Army of 250,000 and equipped it with modern military gadgets--artillery, tanks, machine guns, righting planes. The Mongol Army's greatest accomplishment has been to keep some 350,000 of Japan's crack troops and much of its best equipment tied up, far from the front.

Such was the probable basis of last week's titanic paper war. At reports of far-flung air battles engaging several hundred planes, the skeptical New York Herald Tribune cocked an editorial eyebrow, suggested that the Japanese had drunk too much native sorghum whisky and mistook Lake Bor bustards for Soviet bombers. The only alternative conclusions were: "Either the units of the Japanese Kwantung Army . . . have developed a talent for fiction ... or they are engaged in an undeclared war with the Soviet Union on a scale that deserves a more sophisticated audience than the local nomads and their herds."

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