Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 1943. A CHINESE COUNTERSTROKE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 June 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 1943. A CHINESE COUNTERSTROKE.

J-JOPES that China before long will become, the base for powerful and devastating attacks on Japan are strengthened not a little by the news of the successful drive which Chinese troops, with Allied air support, are now developing in the Yangtse valley, south of Ichang and west of Lake Tungting. The time has not yet come for the Chinese to open a campaign on the greatest scale for the annihilation or expulsion of the Japanese invaders of their territory, but it is indicated that in their latest effort they have struck damaging blows and inflicted very heavy losses on the enemy.

This has been accomplished in the region in which the invaders only last week were reported to have started an offensive which was regarded as their most formidable attempt in six years to end the war in China —an attempt said to be aimed ultimately at the occupation of the provisional Chinese capita] of Chungking, lying well to the west, beyond the famous Yangtse gorges. Reason now appears for believing that the enemy offensive has been smashed and rolled back for the time being—a development the more to be welcomed since for Japan the sands of time are running out.

Already the forces of the Asiatic member of the Axis are spread over actual and potential war areas of vast extent. Her far from adequate shipping resources are being cut down steadily, and according to Chinese and other authorities her total air forces, setting new production against losses, are considerably smaller than those with which she entered the war. Her militarists have little enough reason to be satisfied with their prospects at any point, and perhaps have most reason of all to fear their inability, after nearly six years of immensely costly effort, to end what they have been wont to call “the China incident.”

During these years China has maintained an organised resistance against odds so desperate that when the Japanese launched their large-scale onslaught in 1937 the majority of American and European military experts are said to have estimated the invaded country’s capacity of resistance in weeks or months, not in years.

Now at last there is a promise of better thing's for China. As yet she is assisted only by a comparatively small American air force, dependent on supplies conveyed by air from India, but it is hardly in doubt that in one way and another the Allied leaders took China largely into account in the plans for intensified and expanded action against Japan they shaped at the recent Washington conference. As long ago as last February, indeed, at a Press conference in Washington attended by the wife of the Chinese Generalissimo, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, President Roosevelt spoke in plain terms of the determination of the United Nations to attack Japan from China. Since China was to be used as a base of operations, Mr Roosevelt observed, it would necessarily become probably the most important front against the enemy.

While the reconquest of Burma and the reopening of direct land contact with China doubtless are implied, the precise lines on which the Allies intend to develop their strategy of course will be disclosed only by events. Meantime the course of conflict in the Yangtsc valley suggests that the Japanese find themselves unequal to the task of forestalling and defeating the Allied plans and the Chinese certainly are giving new and impressive proofs of the indomitable courage and resolution which have enabled them to maintain their resistance during nearly six years of warfare as unequal as the world has ever witnessed.