Mcallen Daily Press

Chinese Fight On Without Hope Of Respite

BY JOHN GOETTE International News Service Staff Correspondent

PEKING, China, Jan. 3.-(INS)- No one in Asia has even dared voice the pitiful cry that went up during the World War whenever the holiday season came around- "Out of the trenches by Christmas."

To the millions of Japanese and Chinese soldiers behind the guns from one end of vast China to the other, however much they might want peace, Christmas was just another day of blood and hate.

In the north, border area between China and Manchukuo, thousands of Chinese Red partisans are harassing the Imperial Japanese army. They have recently cut holes through the historic Great Wall so that they can dodge back and forth from China to Manchukuo when Japanese pursuit grows too hot.

There, a real blood feud exists between Chinese and Japanese.

Rewards for Capture

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek has offered his Red guerrillas the equivalent of forty American dollars for every Japanese soldier captured alive. The Japanese raised the ante and promised two hundred dollars for any of the dozen Red leaders taken alive or sixty dollars if brought in dead.

In the Great Wall area hatred is intense. Over four years ago the Japanese army sweeping down from Manchukuo cleared the district of Chinese troops to effect a so-called "demilitarized zone." At that time, they occupied the dignified walled town of Miyun, fifty miles north of Peking.

Now for eight months the Japanese again have been locked in there, only one gate being carefully opened and guarded, while Chinese partisans roam at will in the country-side.

The harassed Japanese invader knows that he has no friends even among the Chinese populace under his guns. Recently a detachment of merchants formed into a self-defense corps and armed with Japanese rifles, was forced to escort a Japanese "mopping-up" party against the Red partisans. Unfortunately for the cavalcade, it ran into an ambush. Eleven Japanese were killed but none of the Chinese detachment were.

Retaliation Embitters Populace

In retaliation, the Japanese forced the merchants' corps to kneel for a full day behind sticks placed in the ground whereon were signs proclaiming their blame for leading the Japanese troops into a death trap. Chinese coming from Miyun describe the bitterness which such treatment instills into the local population.

Entering its twentieth month, the slaughter goes on unabated. It is stupefying to give thought to what the Christian missionaries and their native flocks might have done by way of good and lasting works could they have spent even a part of the money used to deal death and destruction all about them.

Huge War Expense

One illustration suffices. According to Dr. Francis Pan, Director of the General Affairs Department of the Chinese Ministry of Communications, Japanese airmen have dropped 25,000 bombs costing approximately six million American dollars on Chinese railways during the war's first year.

Along the Hankow-Hongkong Railway 5,538 bombs were dropped in 648 Japanese air raids, says Dr. Pan. Average of direct and damaging hits was low, it being estimated that between 68.4 and 81.3 per cent of the bombs were complete misses.

Instead of slowing down as it commences the final six months of its second year, the war in China is being stepped up. Chinese irregulars in northern Kiangsi province report that most of the rifles and ammunition captured from the Japanese bear the mark of 1938.

Japan obviously is not using up old stocks, but rather must be driving home munitions factories to grind out new supplies to extend the conflagration beyond the twenty Chinese provinces already disastrously involved.