China's Need

Would or should U.S. forces land on China's coast?

Over luncheon bowls in Chungking last week, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek chatted with Yank's Sergeant Walter E. Peters, and answered an important question.

To defeat Japan, he said, the U.S. should land on China's coast--but only with a small force. What China mostly needs, he said, is supplies; lao ping, not the G.I., would shed his blood for the continent, and thus few U.S. divisions would be diverted from the Japanese mainland.

Said Chiang: "Where it takes $10 for one American soldier, only $1 is necessary for ours. We must remember that the Chinese soldier is fighting in his own homeland. He knows the topography better than anyone else. He is more suitable to the climate and conditions of fighting. To send American troops where we can employ Chinese troops is not very logical. It would be a big strain on the line of communications."

Last week, with supply still limited to backdoor lines from India, Chinese troops did the best they could, hacked cautiously at targets of opportunity. When Thai puppets suddenly deserted the Japanese, the Chinese seized the opportunity and dashed across the Indo-China frontier to take the minor port of Moncay on the Gulf of Tonkin. The capture of this position gave Chungking the hint of a corridor to the sea.

Farther north, six Chinese columns squeezed Kweilin's defenders "like a turtle in a jar." When Kweilin fell, the Chinese would have recovered the seventh. U.S. air base since the Japanese turned north.

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