Design for Defense?

In the vast plain , of Honan, gaunt Chinese farmers watched the enemy tanks crush their fat grain, watched the enemy horsemen feed their mounts on ripe wheat.

Angrily they said: "Ai-ah, last year the famine ; now the Jih-pen Kwei" -- the Japanese devil.

Japanese tanks scooted along the dusty country roads like beetles. Behind them came cavalry columns, motorized troops, supply trains, artillery. The dust they raised made it plain that this was no usual spring raid. This time it was a full-scale offensive, and it seemed to fit snugly into the Tokyo pattern of global war.

What Can China Do? The Chinese fell back rapidly. Chungking admitted retreat. Tokyo claimed that ten Chinese divisions had been trapped. Busy towns fell one after another. Loyang, where the emperors of the Chou dynasty held court seven centuries before Christ, was ablaze. At any moment the Japanese wedge, if pushed westward, might cut Chungking off from any contact with north China.

Yet China and her allies could do little. The Japanese thrust into India had cut down the already thin trickle of supplies to the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force in China. Acute shortage of trucks to move fuel and ammunition made it nearly impossible to set up air bases close to the new front or to give adequate supply to front-line troops.

Distressing, too, was the state of the Chinese Army in the 82nd grueling month of its war with Japan. Poorly clothed and fed, poorly trained and armed, it was no match for the Japanese war machine.

Japan's first blow in mid-April fell on tough, little Tang En-po, one of Chung king's ablest generals. But Tang's tactical skill could not make up for the inadequate weapons of his men, for the lack of air cover, for the incredibly meager trans port facilities.

Target: Roadbeds. On the map of battle, Tokyo's first objective now be gan to assume shape: full control of the Peiping-Hankow railway. In 1938, the Chinese breached the Yellow river dikes, kept the enemy from this prize; last week, Japanese columns driving from north and south seemed to be close to attaining it.

Little remained of that railway but the pitted roadbed; the rails had been removed by the cautious Chinese. But intelligence reports now showed that the Japanese had dismantled other, less useful railroads, had carted the rails to Sinyang--presumably to be used in retracking the wrecked sections.

To cushion the new line against pressure from the west, the Japanese seemed also to be building a defense belt beyond the railroad. There was a worse, though still remote possibility: from Loyang, the Japanese might try to push on westward through the famed Tungkwan mountain pass, spill into the loess plain of Shansi. Then even China's truck roads to Russia would be in peril.

This week Chungking gloomily predicted that once the Peiping-Hankow line was in use, a new drive would be launched to seize the stretch from Hankow to Canton. The day that line is captured--and repaired--Japan will be able to rush men and supplies more freely than ever before to every corner of her Asiatic fortress.

In the Pacific, the U.S. Fleet and amphibious forces were preparing to push farther west to the objective announced by Admiral Nimitz: a landing on the southeast China coast. Japan's new offensive in far-off Honan province might be the first step in preparing to meet that threat.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.