A Different May

On Chungking hill, the crowds in front of the crossroad billboards, where newspapers are posted for all to read, usually dwindle to worried little knots in the month of May. For in May the sky over Chungking is blue as new coolie cloth, just right for the terrible Japanese planes. But last week, with May well along, there were crowds around the bulletin boards. Spread across them was the most breath-catching news Chungking had seen in nearly five long years of war.

Far Enough. The crowds read anxiously of the southwestern danger.

Along the famed road from Burma the Japanese seemed to be rushing like a flood wave on the Yangtze, irresistible and ruinous. The mere boundary between Burma and China did not dam them. They pressed headlong across into Yuennan Province, where the hills are cruel and the Governor is called The Dragon and the tribesmen are not hospitable.

The Japanese should have known better. In their haste they left behind them the supposedly derelict Chinese army commanded by Lieut. General Joseph Stilwell; in their confidence they hurried into Yuennan only 5,000 strong. At week's end "Uncle Joe's" men came to life and, with a fury that harked back to the Chinese furies at Changsha and Taierchwang, rolled up the Japanese rear. In Yunnan a trap snapped on the Japanese van.

The newsreaders in Chungking, who had begun to feel the well-remembered, chill claustrophobia of having the Burma Road cut off, cheered and were happy. They knew that the strange, fanatic, face-lost Japanese would try again, but for a bit they could feel secure. They knew that they had done what the British in Burma had not--they had stopped the invader. "Hao," they said--"good."

The Silent Men. They read about China's "second front." All along the lost coast the silent men, the guerrillas, men who plough dumbly in daytime but are very keen at night, rose up and attacked. They raided Shanghai, Nanking, Hangchow, Nanchang, Ningpo, Wuhu, Amoy. They tore up the rails of the Nanchang-Kiukiang Railway on the central front, tore down 2,000 assorted yards of Japanese telephone and telegraph lines, blew up four bridges. In Canton, down south, they had killed 500 Japanese, had blown up the telephone exchange.

Isolated, these raids were like guerrilla raids all through China all through the war; but the newspaper readers could not remember when so many raids had come all at once. "Ting hao," they said--"very good."

Something New in the Sky. They read about something they did not know existed--a Chinese air force.

Fifty Japanese bombers pounded airfields in Fukien, Kiangsi, and Hunan Provinces in what the Central News Agency called a "deliberate effort to wipe out Allied air bases in east and south China." Some of the fields lay within 700 miles of Japan. The wonderful thing to the newspaper readers was word that planes of the Chinese air force had gone into the air to fight back; and had even bombed Japanese garrisons. "Hun hun hao," they said--"wonderful."

After Five Years. They read other news which seemed good: about how the Japanese, near the end of five years of war, had been forced to start a battle in Shantung Province, far in the north, near where the whole war had begun; about how they had bombed the Lunghai Railway, which the Japanese had tried to break almost as many times as the line has ties; and of course about how the American friends had beaten part of the Japanese Fleet. They spat when they read that the traitor Wang Ching-wei had gone to Manchukuo, where the Japanese were said to be concentrating troops against the Russians.

Perhaps the readers were hasty with their grins. But they could not help feeling that this May was different. After all, this May the Japanese planes had not once crawled like silver lice across Chungkings coolie-cloth sky.

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