Chungking Bombings

There is a fascination about bombing raids. Some foolish atavistic fancy for birds of prey makes men stay out and watch successive waves of planes fly over, voiding their terrible little pellets. Even cowards do it. The most pathetic human race, the Chinese, do it. Last week they did it in Chungking, and died like flies.

Chungking ought to be the world's safest city in wartime. It is surrounded by terrain so rugged that it would be almost impossible to assault it by land. It is embraced by two treacherous rivers, whose water level has been known to change as much as 40 feet in one night. Eight months in the year it is roofed with dense fog. Built on a rock 750 feet high, it is honeycombed with deep, bombproof caverns, with room for 200,000. But the Chinese never learn. They still think standing under trees makes them safe from bombs. They still think it is better to stay where money circulates than be safe and poor in the country.

Last March, knowing well that the lifting of the mists in May would bring bombs, the Chinese Government undertook systematic evacuation of Chungking's population, estimated then at over 750,000. Police circulated through the city, first warning residents without domicile permits (issued after last May's terrible raids) to leave town, then sealing their houses. Cinemas, singsong halls, western-style restaurants were ordered closed. Schools and unessential Government bureaus were to be evacuated. The aim: a population reduced to 100,000. Last week's population: 750,000.

Early in the week the Japanese struck. Lookout stations on the border of Szechwan Province spotted the planes, flying high. Chungking authorities were notified. Alarm sirens wailed. All over the city frantic Chinese hurried out in the open, crying "Chin pao! Chin pao!" ("The alarm! The alarm!"). In the downtown areas, where shopkeepers had built wooden stalls over the ruins from last May; up on the hill, where the livid scar of a huge incendiary-bomb fire had been covered with a town of mat sheds; across the Yangtze River, where the U. S. Embassy stands--all through the city, the natives milled, and watched for the planes in terror. Only one in four reached a bomb shelter. That day 99 planes flew over.

The next day there was another alarm: 160 planes. The day after that there were 160 again. The city smoldered. The foreign quarter, Chungking University, Government buildings, the teeming shopping sector--these were the "military objectives" the Japanese announced they had attacked. On the fourth day 54 planes came; on the fifth, 52. The U. S. gunboat Tutuila was narrowly missed. The American Methodist Mission was hit.

Day after day the planes came. Politely a Japanese naval spokesman in Hankow said that raids would continue daily until Chungking's "spirit of resistance is broken." Each day the foolish, childish Chinese looked into the sky and wondered whether the planes would come. When they did, the stolid, fascinated faces of those about to die watched them, with a hate which would not be broken even if the Japanese bombed until the whole 750-foot rock of Chungking was blasted to sea level.

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