Victory Deferred

Whatever Roosevelt and Churchill decided at Quebec about future blows against Japan remained a military secret. But there were signs that the Allied military disaster in Kwangsi Province (TIME, Sept. 25) might compel changes within China and thus lead to better things.

Last week the Japanese did not drive directly into Kweilin; they circled it to the south. But this made little difference; they were already in sight of their objective: driving the Fourteenth U.S. Air Force out of southeast China.* The Fourteenth still had four strips, now all doomed, east of the Hankow-Canton railway. Soon only the biggest of Chennault's planes will be able to reach the South China Sea, where in the first 19 days of September his B-24s alone had sunk 74,600 tons of Jap shipping. The hope of using Chennault's air forces to support the promised approach of Admiral Nimitz to the China coast has gone glimmering.

Chinese v. Chinese. While the situation in the field has worsened, so has the morale of China's Army. This year's Japanese campaigns, first in the Yellow River valley and then southward from Changsha to Kweilin, have been a series of defeats for the Chinese because:

P: The underfed troops had to live off the peasantry and often were so rapacious that they alienated their own people.

P: The morale of officers, unable to live on their pay, deteriorated equally. They often padded their ration rolls with fictitious names, sold the extra supplies for living expenses.

P: As a result there have been cases this year of Chinese troops disarmed by their own people; other cases when officers took the few trucks that the Chinese Army had and used them to save their household goods (four high officers were shot for this after the fall of Changsha).

But one element of hope in the situation is that its gravity is forcing the Chinese to pull themselves together (see FOREIGN NEWS).

A few weeks ago Chiang Kai-shek began to take steps to reform the draft machinery. One of his ablest generals, Chen Cheng, is pushing a reorganization of the Army, to abolish about a third of its theoretical divisions, so that henceforth Chinese Army units will be full strength.

Meantime, China's allies are doing a little to remedy the basic conditions which made these reforms necessary.

The trickle of supplies to China, flown over the Hump from India by the U.S. Army Air Transport Command, has grown to a rill: almost 25,000 tons a month, as compared with barely half that in the good old days of the bad old Burma Road. In addition, the Fourteenth and Twentieth carry in much of their own gasoline. Of the A.T.C.'s tonnage, 25 to 40% goes to Chinese ground troops, under the personal allocation and supervision of General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell. This comprises 75-and 105-mm. guns, trucks, jeeps, small arms and ammunition.

Chief credit for getting so much over the Hump goes to grizzled, pipe-smoking Brigadier General Thomas O. Hardin, commander of the India-China wing of the A.T.C., who has driven his pilots to perform miracles of mountain flying. But some of the miracles have been performed farther back on the war's longest supply line.

Lean, good-humored Brigadier General Gilbert X. ("Buck") Cheves, cavalryman by background, a port commander in the Service Forces by necessity, has broken the Calcutta bottleneck. During his first month on the job, the tonnage unloaded doubled. Recently a Liberty which had taken ten days to load in the U.S. was emptied on the Hooghly in 46 hours 4 minutes (standard elsewhere: seven to nine days).

The next big step to redress the debacle in south China will probably have to wait for the fall of Germany. With the diversion of material no longer needed for Europe, the volume of war supplies for Asia will grow more rapidly. For example, heavy bomber groups can fly from Britain or Italy to India, carrying their own ground crews. Ships on their way to Europe with munitions can be diverted to Calcutta or Colombo. There will be plenty of men and arms; and some should be able to move over a rerouted Burma Road through Myitkyina and Tengyueh into China. But still there will be difficulty finding bases close enough to the enemy to use all this military windfall effectively. But the slowly rising pressure on Japan will mount more swiftly, and aid will come not only directly to China but month by month as Admiral Nimitz moves across the Pacific--and probably from another source. Russia, meticulously neutral until Germany's fall, will want to have the voice which only an active partner can have in the Pacific settlement (see FOREIGN NEWS).

*Since the Japanese drove south from Changsha in June, the Fourteenth has lost fighter strips at Lishui in Kiangsu Province, Wenchow in Chekiang Province and a third north of Hengyang; it has lost major bases at Hengyang, Ling-ling and finally Kweilin. It has fallen back on Liuchow (now threatened), 90 miles southeast of Kweilin, and Nanning, 115 miles farther along the same line (now also threatened).

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