Bloody Changsha

No battlefield of World War II has been more often contested than the 100-mile arc that fans north of Changsha, mid-China communications junction. Three times in three years the Japanese have slashed their way down from the Yangtze to fail almost at the gates of the city's smoke-stained shell.

Last week, like a recording needle caught in a groove, the campaign was repeating itself for the fourth time. Four Japanese columns drove south on the city. All through southeast Asia Japanese columns were moving forward in just such a fashion, using the lore acquired in four and a half years of war: swift deployment, individual initiative, shelter-and-assault. But only at Changsha were the Japanese faced with soldiers who had experience against the Japanese and who know how to apply the countertactics of dispersion, road destruction and depth-defense.

The Chinese faded back, sucking the enemy into a tangle of dispersed units. Soon the battle beat about the city itself. Then at dusk one day, as a pelting rain drove down, the Chinese signaled a counterattack. Artillery fire scorched a crumbling pocket of some four Japanese divisions caught north of the city. Boasting that they had inflicted 52,000 casualties on the enemy in a week, the Chinese rushed a party of foreign correspondents to Changsha to tell the world how the Japanese looked on the run.

Though amiable Vice Minister Hollington Tong's Publicity Board probably mixed a large measure of wishful thinking with its account of the victory, there could be no doubt that Chinese troops had achieved one of the most savage bloodlettings of the long war. They had also proved that they could hold their central China lines intact while dispatching crack divisions to aid hard-pressed Allies in Burma.

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