Victory on the Yangtze

From Chungking TIME Correspondent Theodore H. White cabled this week:

The Japanese Army has been whipped. All last week, through villages and towns they devastated in the past month, raked by Chinese and American airmen, elements of five Japanese divisions, plus straggling traitors in their pay, were marching back to the north bank of the Yangtze and the protective river barriers.

No one knows, even now, what the Japanese objectives were in this campaign. It was probably the artless pessimism broadcast from Chungking during the original drive through the lowlands south of the Yangtze that stimulated the Japanese to the blunder of overextension. Without consolidating their rear, without digging in, they drove headfirst into a trap that the Central Chinese Command had prepared for just such a campaign.

Tea Trucks & Jeeps. On a concave line some 60 miles south of the Yangtze, General Chen Cheng, one of China's top field commanders, met the frontal thrust. South of the Japanese, in the rear, burly General Sun Lien-chung held a secondary force for a counterblow. In Chungking the Government commandeered a motley fleet of private and public motor vehicles--from tea trucks to jeeps--and rushed to the front all the reserve supplies it could mobilize.

To counter the Japanese air force, which had cleared the way for the first advance, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek decided to throw in a new Chinese air force never before risked in battle. Elements of the Fourteenth Air Force of the U.S. Army moved up from South China bases almost overnight. In three days they erected a new communications system through Central China and flung heavy and medium bombers and pursuit planes into the battle.

By the Rock of Shihpai. Ten miles up the river from Ichang stands a mammoth slab of rock called Shihpai (stone tablet). Here was one key to the fortifications of Central China, and against it the Japanese threw two full divisions. To the defenders of Shihpai the Generalissimo sent a personal message exhorting them to hold firm. This was the crisis--and they held.

The Chinese pursuit force swooped down on the Japanese positions and, unopposed, raked them from end to end. The Chinese pursuits flew so low that at times the Japanese on the hilltops could shoot at them from above. At the Japanese rear Chinese bombers, lumbering Russian SBs and U.S. Lockheed Hudson A-29s, B-24s and B-25s were smashing bases and devastating the railhead at Yochow, smashing ferry points at Ichang, sinking river shipping, laying waste the Ichang airdrome and artillery emplacements.

The Retreat Begins. By Memorial Day the Jap retreat from Shihpai to Ichang had begun. Simultaneously Sun Lien-chung struck north from Changteh against the Japanese rear with a mighty blow. The Japanese decided to withdraw entirely from the flatlands to positions on the north bank of the Yangtze.

But the decision had been too long delayed. As their pedestrian columns, slowed by pack-animal transport, strung out across the native roads, American P-40s caught six columns and strafed them viciously and unmercifully. The columns broke and ran. The P-40s went on to blitz all river craft being assembled in the Yangtze for retreat.

By week's end Sun Lien-chung's drive from the south had taken Kungan, the main Japanese forward base, recovered Nanhsien and Nanhsian on the northern shore of Tungting Lake and was forging on to the river. Chen Cheng had driven to the south bank within sight of Ichang, and eliminated the last Japanese ferry head at Itu.

A New Confidence Born. The Chinese had defeated the largest single striking force the Japanese had put together since Burma in 1942. The Japanese were back almost to their starting point, had lost most of the rice bowl, had yielded control of the river from Ichang to Shasi to mine-laying squadrons of the Chinese Navy.

In the perspective of global war the victory was small. The Japanese struck with probably no more than 60,000 men. They lost perhaps no more than 10,000. The entire arena of combat was only 70 by 60 miles. There was little likelihood of a further change in the lines, as the Chinese Army lacked supplies to surge onward in a full offensive.

But in the Battle for Asia it was a most important victory. It emphasized once again the importance of air power in a limited arena, underlined Japanese weakness under air attack. It brought priceless harmony and understanding between the U.S. and Chinese air forces. And it gave the Chinese new confidence in themselves. Ultimately this was more important than anything else.

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