One-Ball Jin Bao

The tiny U.S. air force in China was not yet strong enough to keep up a steady offensive thrust against the enemy. But it was stout enough in fighter strength to meet the Jap when it found him. Last week it found him every time, and found him before he was able to get at his bombing objectives. For that, the few remaining veterans of A.V.G. and the youngsters of the Army Air Forces' Twenty-Third Pursuit Group could thank the wondrous Chinese air-raid warning system.

They saw it at its best when the enemy made his first attempt in eleven months to bomb Chungking, which had lain in its dugouts, all but defenseless, through 142 destructive raids between 1939 and 1941. It was the dusk of a balmy day when in fighter headquarters the radio began to peep and squawk. Chinese operators took the messages; they came from courageous Chinese watchers at secret radios deep in

Japanese territory. The enemy was off the field at Hankow down the Yangtze. At signal poles on Chungking's heights, civilians saw an old, familiar signal: yellow triangular lanterns, which told them that the enemy was on the wing.

U.S. and Chinese officers clustered around the plotting boards. Other warning stations reported. The Jap was headed for Chungking, was only half an hour away. A black ball replaced the lantern on the warning poles, and Chungking's patient thousands trudged to the dugouts, where 25,000 A.R.P. workers distributed "air defense cakes" of wheat and corn flour.

On airdromes and dispersal fields Chinese attendants ran from one group of pilots to another calling "One-ball jin bad" (one-ball air raid). The pilots climbed into their cockpits. The pursuits began to move, wheeling out of dust clouds in clots of threes, whirring down the runways. In the twilight Chungking's airraid wardens watched them wheel east to meet the enemy.

The Jap never got to Chungking. It was moonlight when the fighters met his 50 bombers somewhere east of the city, and no fighter could be sure that the bomber he started smoking with his tracers actually went down. But the bomber formations broke and their pilots struck for home--all but four, which plowed on toward Chungking. Near the edge of the city the fighters caught them. They jettisoned their bombs in open fields and streaked away. From its dugouts, after three hours, Chungking emerged. Its cakes had been eaten, its morale bolstered by what U.S. flyers, with Chinese help, had done that night.

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