New Wine

Last week the lamb rose up and bit the wolf. Having been chased hurry-scurry from Kiangsi Province right to the suburbs of Changsha, Hunan, the Chinese turned around and, with a fury they have never shown before, lashed the Japanese back and back. This week a Japanese spokesman in Shanghai had to admit that his country's forces had returned to positions they occupied when the drive started.

Chinese strategy was superb. As they fell back toward Changsha, leading the Japanese to believe that they were still following the same old no-frontal-attack theories, the Chinese destroyed every rail line, every road. The Japanese blithely advanced over this torn-up area until they were in the worst military position known to man: on a thin front without communications behind. That was when the Chinese struck. The Japanese had nothing to do but run.

Drunk with the new wine, success, the Chinese tried another daring thrust. In broad daylight eight bombers flew 450 miles from Chungking to Hankow, where they bombed the Japanese air base. They claimed to have destroyed 50 out of 180 Japanese planes, to have returned intact. Japanese admitted that bombs had hit stores of gasoline at their air base, "causing explosions that rocked the city."

Altogether it was an unrelieved week of lost face for the Japanese. A spokesman in Tokyo admitted that the fighting against Russia on the Mongolian border, terminated by a surprise truce on Sept. 16, had been climaxed by a "disastrous, bitter battle." Soviet forces both numerically and mechanically superior to the Japanese had engaged them on the barren Holumbar Plain, devoid of cover of any kind, and whipped them. Admitted casualties: 18,000 killed, wounded, sick.

Chinese reaction was typical. Instead of quietly pressing these advantages into major victories, they stacked their arms, threw their hats in the air, and paraded all over free China.

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