JAPAN'S WAR LOAD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 May 1938, Page 7

JAPAN'S WAR LOAD

FORCE OF A MILLION MEN IN CHINA

Three Hundred Thousand Watching Soviet Frontier

BATTLES FOR THE LUNG HAI RAILWAY

By Telegraph —Press Association. —Copyright.

( . LONDON, May 14. It is believed that there are now i;000,000 Japanese troops in China, of whom 300,000 are immobilised from the conflict because they are watching the Soviet frontier. One Japanese soldier in China is costing five times as much as at home, irrespective of the swelling burden of the transport of munitions, foodstuffs and raw materials. Nevertheless, there is nothing to indicate the likelihood of mediation. The Chinese finances are not overstrained. China can pay cash on delivery for some munitions, but the Soviet is allowing large quantities on long, credits, encouraging the Chinese to fight the Japanese on its behalf. The Soviet is also supplying to China heavy transport planes and has established a chain of air bases, enabling constant supplies from inland.

The Chinese are also procuring aeroplanes from America, in addition to munitions from Europe.

The Japanese announce at Shanghai that a mobile column severed the Lung Hai railway, blowing up a bridge hear Tangshan. The Chinese are destroying harbour works at Haichow and blowing up tracks and bridges east and west along the railway, fearing a Japanese landing at the port as part of the campaign against Suchow. One hundred civilians were killed and 500 wounded by a Japanese air raid on Hsuchow. Two hundred Japanese planes bombed' the Tientsin-Pukow-Shanghai railways and other centres, including Suhsien, where 300 refugees were killed at the Katalian Catholic Mission.

The “Domei” News Agency in Tokio claims that the Japanese isolated Hsuchow and 70 to 80 Chinese divisions are faced with surrender ox; annihilation. The Japanese crossed the Yellow River at Puyang and occupied Tsaochow, from which point the Lung Hai railway is under gunfire. A message from Hankow states that

the • Chinese counter-attacked and drove back the Japanese in the neighbourhood of Yungchen.

The Hong Kong correspondent of the “Daily Herald” says refugees allege that the Japanese massacred 4000 Chinese civilians at Amoy. The British community is seething with indignation at the Japanese arrest and maltreatment'of a bird lover, Mr E. S. Wilkinson, who climbed a barbed wire in the Japanese sector to observe nesting birds. Mr Wilkinson complains that Japanese soldiers performed a war dance around him in the prison yard at the jail and finally thrust a bayonet into his shoulder, just missing a lung.

CHINESE ARMIES CAUGHT LIKE RATS IN BAG ACCORDING TO JAPANESE ' CLAIM (Recd This Day, 11.25 a.m.) LONDON, May 15. The “Times’s’’ Tokio correspondent says the Japanese, by cutting the Lung Hai Railway at three points, claim that they have caught the Chinese armies like rats in a bag. Trie dispatch states that the Japanese are gradually shortening their encircling lines in order to develop one of the greatest annihilating operations of the war. The Ching Kaishek line, which took seven years to construct, is allegedly collapsing, and the Chinese defending Suchow are thrown inextricably into confusion. Air squadrons are bombing the fugitives, and have destroyed the telegraph and telephone offices at Suchow. Reports from Taiyuanfu state that 20,000 Chinese volunteers fighting for the Japanese crossed from Shansi into Shensi and occupied Suanchwan, where they were joined by portions of the mutinous Shansi and Szechuan armies, who are marching on Sianfu.