Attrition

In the old library of Nanking's Defense Ministry last week Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek held an earnest council of war. Captured Communist war plans helped the Gerieralissimo to make his points. He read aloud Communist Chieftain Mao Tse-tung's own outline for the offensive in Central China, quoted from the latest tactical instructions for Communist field commanders. But the intentions and capabilities of China's Red Army were clear enough without captured Communist war plans. Last week that Red Army possessed the military initiative in China, and appeared to be winning its war of attrition and disintegration.

In Manchuria outnumbered Nationalist forces clung to a few encircled cities, including Changchun and Mukden; Ying-pan, an approach to the strategic Fushun coal center, was besieged. The rest of Manchuria was in Communist hands. Nationalist losses had been heavy.

In North China the Communists captured the strategic rail-junction city of Shihchiachuang, seizing its virtually irreplaceable stores of rolling stock, locomotives and military supplies.

In Central China, usually free of strong Red forces, the Communists were rampaging along the strategic east-west Lunghai railway, and staging diversionary raids down to the Yangtze River.

Communist raiders were tearing up railway lines faster than they could be replaced, almost faster than the news could be relayed to the next strong point.* There were some bright spots: the Government had driven the Communists from their main seaside base, in Shantung; had won some local gains in the north. These, however, were details; the important news from China was that the Communists were winning the civil war, and would go on winning it unless Nanking found new sources of men, money and arms.

"Drop in the Bucket." Never had Nationalist China more anxiously craved a sign that the U.S. recognized and responded to China's critical hour. What Chinese got, by way of a sign last week, was Secretary of State George Marshall's testimony before a Senate committee that, in his opinion, China would need economic support at the rate of $20 million a month, beginning next April and continuing for some 15 months.

Although this meant that aid to China was at last out of the pigeonhole, it seemed too little, too late. Some grim Chinese, who compared Marshall's sum to the $500 million a month he proposed to spend to buttress Western Europe, decided that the time had come to write off the U.S. entirely. Said Chinese Vice President Sun Fo: "A drop in the bucket.. . . I've always had a hidden suspicion that American friendship was not dependable."

Others wondered what conditions

Washington would attach. Liberal, scholarly Hu Shih took a parable from Mencius : "Here are a small basket of rice and a bowl of soup, and the case is one in which the getting of them will preserve life and the want of them will be death. [Yet] if they are offered with insulting voice, even a tramp will not receive them . . . even a beggar will not stoop to take them." Still other Chinese, not quite sure what the U.S. might eventually ladle out, hoped for more than drops. Editorialized Shanghai's China Press last week: "China's needs remain twofold: 1) aid in the military field ... 2) aid in the economic field. . . . The two needs are interrelated in every sense. . . . This must be as obvious in Washington as it is in Nanking." A hint that other U.S. help might be on the way came last week in a dispatch from Nanking describing negotiations for purchase by China of an undisclosed amount of munitions and 600 surplus transport planes from the U.S.

*To carry the news, the Chinese Government was supplying train crews and station-masters with homing pigeons inherited from the Japanese Army.

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