Collapsing Front

Even as the nation good-naturedly shook hands with itself after the election battle, the realities of the world came crowding back. The Berlin airlift was clapped under new Russian pressures. The U.S.-supported Sophoulis cabinet wobbled and fell in Greece. Along the nation's East Coast a wildcat strike of longshoremen exploded into a full-scale tie-up. Then last week came the news that the whole Nationalist government in China faced collapse, that Nationalist China was fighting for its life on the Suchow front.

What could the U.S. do? Washington was publicly silent. Senator Styles Bridges, chairman of the congressional "watchdog" committee on foreign aid, demanded a special session of Congress. But that idea was promptly labelled absurd. The fate of prostrate China now seemed only a matter of days.

In rejecting Bridges' suggestion, at least one high Washington official emphasized the present hopelessness of the whole Chinese situation, on which the U.S., for the past three years, had turned its back. The U.S. had made mistakes, he pointed out, which could not be corrected overnight. China's Nationalist government was also deeply at fault. Something was obviously wrong with Nationalist military leadership. Why, for example, had well-trained, well-equipped Nationalist divisions refused to fight at Mukden?

Was there nothing, then, the U.S. could do? The hard truth was that the U.S. position in China was almost bankrupt. The New York Times reported: "Military Aid for China Is Sent in Navy Vessels." EGA officials did their best to step up shipping schedules, get cargoes of rice into Shanghai, whose authorities were harassed by food riots. But it was too late for such slight and tardy assurances of friendship and aid to have much practical or spiritual effect.

Outside of actual military intervention by U.S. forces in China, there was probably nothing the nation could do for the moment but wait and hope. Said the Washington official: "I have every sympathy for China, and God knows I'd like to see Communism rooted off the face of the earth. But what can we do at an hour like this? We couldn't even get anything started before this battle will be brought to a melancholy or a successful conclusion."

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