CHINESE WAR METHODS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 193, 15 December 1941, Page 5

CHINESE WAR METHODS

BEATING JAPANESE BLITZKRIEG ENCIRCLING STRATEGY The Chinese soldier is' a remark-* able person. He is to be seen tramp-' ing along a highway leading a lean pig or piling his arms while he tends a vegetable plot. Yet in the past two weeks these extraordinary fighting men have defeated the greatest Japanese offensive for two years, which had all the equipment of a mechanical blitzkrieg, writes: the Sydney Morning Herald's correspondent in Chungking. During the big Hunan offensive which began when the Japanese, on September 18, started their push across the Hsinchiang River and virtually ended on October 2, when their withdrawal from 2 a.m. onwards became a general retreat from, the battle-scarred aeas: around. I studied the campaign daily with, high military officers. Apart from being extraordinarily frank and completely ready toi outline every movement on military maps, I l'ound them very confident —a confidence that had a rather baffling quality as far as a western observer was concerned. For the Japanese were employing a quarter of their army of occupation. They had tanks, naval co-operation in the network of the Tunting Lakes, over two hundred bombers and ten days of weather in which they could bomb from dawn to dusk. They had something like half a division cf artillery troop-carrying planes, and parachutists with machine guns. A-nd tlieir intelligence had reported to them that some of the crack Chinese divisions had been removed from the Ninth War Zone—"where the fighting took place—to the vicinity of Kunming, where they are acting as a barrier against any threat nt the road from Burma.

Japan's Failure Yet in two weeks this intensive effort, intended to show to the world, at a highly important moment, just how militarily powerful and efficient they Avere, rebounded against the Japanese in a most embarrassing fashion. I believe that implicit faith in this short and deadlj r campaign is the • clue to Japan's absolute failure to complete "the Chinese incident." According to the book—which is how the Japanese fight—it should have been a walkover. Yet as I write comes news of the Chinese harrassing the retreating Japanese as they cross the Milo River, Avhich runs to the north of Ghangsha. In between this and their next river crossing, the Hsin-chiang, there are more Chinese, ready to make this tactical withdrawal as unpleasant as possible. This is where the skill of China's magentic strategy becomes apparent. Magentic strategy was worked out by Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, one of the world's greatest soldiers and unquestionably the greatest military tactician the Far East has ever produced. The basic idea is for the Chinese troops to fall back before the enemy, but at the same time for units to deploy so that they will be able to attack the flanks of the columns as they pass. Eventually, the flank attackers from both sides will link behind the enemy, while those who have ""magnetically" drawn the enemy on will join with them in a surrounding movement. And as manpower is China's only inexhaustible weapon, it is a cardinal point of the strategy that the force which surrounds should be as much larger than the enemy as to make it possible either to annihilate or severely batter his forces. In the north Hunan campaign tht. Japanese set out with ten days supplies and ammunition, relying on either obtaining the harvested rice crops in the vicinity of Changsha or bringing supplies down the Can-ton-Hankow railway and the Hsiang River "from the Tunting Lakes. They were unable to get the rice, nor were they able to get anything at all useful from a countryside whose peasants rapidly adopted some local scorched earth policies of their own. Then they found that booms and mines had ben laid across the waterwavs, while inroads and roadways for 150 kilometres from Changsha had been rendered impassable. And the vicious Japanese bombing, while it admittedly caused Chinese losses, did nothing to remedy the supply position.