The Gorge of the Wu-ti Ho

Japan is curled like a cobra at the back door of China. Last week Japan was cobra-quiet, but China and her allies were alert. U.S. and R.A.F. planes harassed the enemy from the air. Brigadier General Claire Chennault's China-based air forces, in their most destructive raid of the war, blasted Haiphong in Indo-China, destroying shipping and munition dumps. Chennault's tactics were brilliant. Lightning-like, he struck around the compass. R.A.F. and U.S. pilots from India attacked Jap airdromes in Thailand and Burma. And in Yunnan, China's southernmost province, the troops of General Chiang Kai-shek waited in the jungles.

Theirs was the strangest battlefront in the world. Six months ago, when the Japs crossed the Salween River on their drive up the Burma Road, crack units of China's Army rushed in and drove the Japs back across the river, then took up a 200-mile-long position on the Salween's east bank. In the terrible summer heat and torrential rains of the pestilential country, they settled down to a nightmare existence.

Dying Weather. Mountains, mottled green, yellow, red and grey, tower thousands of feet into the air, drop precipitously into the emerald green Salween, called by the natives Wu-ti Ho, the River without a Bottom. In the jungles with the Chinese were leopards and tigers, pythons that swallowed whole live hogs, monkeys that stole soldiers' food, wolves that howled at night and tried to steal dead soldiers. In the river, said the natives, were little fish with hides thicker than leather; bigger, leather-skinned.fish whose mouths opened and shut like folding doors. Some of the natives, ceremoniously neutral, stalked the Japanese with poisoned arrows; some hunted the heads of unwary Chinese.

But worst of all was ta-pai-tzu (malaria). This was the worst malaria spot in the world. The deadly mosquitoes infested the gorge. Exhausted, underfed and ragged soldiers had neither mosquito nets for protection nor quinine to combat the fever. Casualties from malaria were higher than from combat. Apparently well men trudging along the mountain passes would suddenly flush, complain of the fire in their heads, then die. It was months before adequate quantities of quinine reached them.

The Japanese were better off on their side of the gorge. They had the southern end of the Burma Road, over which they could transport medicine and materiel, move their men back to base hospitals. For the Chinese the section of the Burma Road which they held, winding on north to Chungking, was a broken, impassable trail. They themselves had destroyed it to forestall any further Jap advance.

Fighting Weather. By last week the winter sun was creeping down into the bottom of the gorge. The summer rains were over. Nights brought relief from the terrible, choking heat. It was fighting weather.

Artillery barked more frequently from invisible positions on the mountain sides. Occasionally a machine gun rattled. No soldier or gun was visible, so carefully were positions and emplacements camouflaged. But the noise of firing swelled into a roar, echoing back & forth between the towering mountains. When it died away the Chinese, crouching in their hidden dugouts, could hear the sound of enemy trucks in the hills beyond rumbling up with fresh supplies. The Chinese who had held the front against ta-pai-tzu waited now for the next infestation in the valley of Wu-ti Ho.

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