North of Canton

On only one of the world's battlefronts were the Allies in tragic defeat. In south-central China the Japanese drove relentlessly along the Canton-Hankow railroad to secure the western bastion of their stolen empire (TIME, July 3). Cabled TIME Correspondent Teddy White from an American air base in China:

Never has the Fourteenth Air Force fought more gloriously than in this hour

of crisis. The cumulative tension and exhaustion of weeks of ceaseless fighting are now visible in the grim, hardened countenance of 29-year-old General Clinton ("Casey") Vincent and in the sunken cheeks of Colonel David ("Tex") Hill, who command Chennault's unshaven fighter pilots in their greatest stand.

The ground crews sweat around the clock to keep the handful of planes in the air; they are bitterly tired and they talk in leaden, toneless voices. From dawn to dusk along the road our planes are never out of hearing. Pursuit pilots stop only to wolf down cold canned beans and hot coffee before returning to the air again.

They fly three or four missions a day.

Where I Came In. The whole atmosphere of this base makes you think you have been sitting through some cheap Hollywood melodrama which is beginning all over again. You say to yourself, "My God, this is where I came in -- it's two years ago." The Jap advance has covered 80 miles in the past fortnight. Before it the entire network of American bases upon which our coastal strategy is predicated is disintegrating.

Already the northernmost bases are either in Jap hands or evacuated and helpless. At the bases now ready to be abandoned, supply officers are opening up the last stores. Turkey with cranberry sauce was served at one base before it was abandoned. At another the quartermaster dug deep in his poor hoard and disgorged a gingerbread mix.

Bombs from India. American G.I.s are digging holes in the runways they sweated so hard to build. They tamp down 1,000-Ib. bombs to blow up the fields they de fended with their blood, bombs that were laboriously flown here across the Hump from India at the cost of American lives.

G.I.s, baking in the midsummer heat, are poling sampans loaded with generators, repair equipment and fragmentation bombs down the Taiang River ahead of the Jap advance. The Chinese hostel servants wistfully watch the Americans pack, are packing themselves.

A mad, incongruous quality is lent the evacuation up north by camp-followers --the girls wait till the last, then wave goodbye. The infection of fear is spreading down as far as this area, too, although the Japs are 180 miles away. "So long and good luck, buddies," says a sign in a favorite American night spot, signed, "Anne and Yvonne." Machine Guns and Blood. For a full month the forward echelon of the Fourteenth has been making almost the only resistance to the Japanese Army's tremendous thrust into the bowels of American strategy and Chinese life. Below them, in the green rice fields, between the eroded red hills, the barefoot Chinese Army, outgunned, outflanked and outmaneuvered, withdraw desperately to escape the Japanese. They have no chance. "Where's General Hsueh Yueh, when's he going to fight?" I asked a Chinese Army officer. He turned on me bitterly. "What you mean is how is he going to fight--the Japs have artillery, the Japs have poison gas and the Japs have cavalry and trucks. All we got is machine guns and blood, and our troops have no masks."

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