The Taste of Defeat
TIME, Monday, Sep. 25, 1944
As top strategists at Quebec/> (see U.S./>/> AT WAR) debated how best to speed the end of the war in the Orient, the war in the Orient went on. Many people remember the Allied military catastrophes of 1942; few knew that another occurred last week. TIME Correspondent Teddy White describes the debacle in which the Japanese drove Claire Chennault's air force from its principal advance base in South China/>:
Some day Chinese chronicles will record the whole story of the South China/> campaign in all its glory and disgrace, its heroism and cowardice, its sacrifices and intrigues.
We and the Chinese had been fighting south of Hengyang/>/> for a fortnight when the big break came. The weather had been cloudy and locked in all the way up the valley; never could we pour in all the air support in our power till the day we said goodbye to Kweilin/>. Then the sun shone clear and unchallenged and then it was too late.
Units the Chinese Army had marshaled for the defense of Kwangsi/> Province/> and its capital, Kweilin, had all kinds and grades of equipment: U.S./>/> artillery, Russian tanks, Jap or Chinese guns. Some had fired away the last shell before the climax of the campaign came. Some were exhausted, others untried. In one corner of the Jap flank General Hsueh Yueh had 4,000 men—but only 2,000 serviceable rifles. Other units lacked boards to construct shelters, lacked signal flags for communicating with American airplanes, lacked radios to link their own flanks to their own headquarters.
By Hoof and Wheel. The Japanese were there in force and they were mobile, ahorse, afoot and truck-fed. They could marshal superiority in numbers at any point they chose. They had a fifth column of diabolical proportions. In Kweilin/>, some said, General Kenji Doihara himself was directing the fifth column, but they were wrong. Behind the elbow of every soldier stood the fear of a traitor; the fifth column was among the refugee flood on southbound trains, collecting information, firing buildings, shooting at sight.
We had hoped to hold the Japs in Hwangshaho/> Pass/>, north of Chuanhsien, 90 miles from Kweilin/>. But four days ago, the line gave. Kweilin/>, with its airfields, had to be evacuated—destroyed, abandoned, leaving the Japanese only its ruins, and it had to be done in 36 hours.
Personnel had to be folded up like a telescope so that operations against the advancing enemy could proceed without an hour's halt; so that men could perform their last service from Kweilin, fly south at nightfall, to pick up the thread of continuity at rear bases immediately.
At dawn, a B-25 and the last transport would take off, carrying Brigadier General Clinton ("Casey") Vincent, his tactical staff, General "Tim" Timberman. Chief of Ground Forces, David Lee ("Tex/>/>") Hill. On the ground then would remain only the last demolition men under Colonel Waldo Kenerson, to blow the last field, the last buildings; and Major George Hightower to make sure no air-corps strays were left behind at the last minute.
Dispatcher. Hightower is a slim, superbly unruffled boy from Georgia/>/>; as soon as he was ordered out he was on the phone collecting his lists, planning his truck and plane requirements for all air personnel. "Hello," he would say into the phone, "Joe? This is George—what will you need to get out?—Six by plane, twelve by truck, the rest you're handling yourself?—Is that all? Are you sure?" He would scrawl the figures down, then say again, "Are you sure now?"
In the suburbs the last of the refugees were still crawling out in a pitiful trek—by ricksha, by horsecart, by foot. A man lay dead by the side of the road; people heaped straw on his body and went on. A woman bound a wet, bleeding, shapeless foot. A farmer carried his baby in a basket hung from his shoulder stave—and the baby laughed happily.
In barren streets, soldiers worked furiously on machine-gun posts, slit trenches and barricades that they would use soon.
Vinegar Joe's O.K. Midmorning of the last day brought in Generals Stilwell and Chennault to confer with local U.S./>/> officers and with General Chang Fa-kwei, the Chinese commander. The officers gave the ground data, the air picture. Stilwell okayed the final decision—blow it and get out. They stayed for several hours, then rolled down to the line and were off.
At dusk the last planes were on the field loading cargo, the last trucks were pulling out down the road south. Majors, colonels and lieutenant colonels moved down the line, hoisting signal boards, generators, tires, duffle bags into planes. Everyone left on the field was swept into the last loading, kidding, joking, unreserved, uncomplaining. There was darkness before the last load was aboard.
Then on all the field only two planes were left: General Vincent's B-25 and an auxiliary transport to carry off the remaining personnel. The loading was finished. Orders called for midnight demolition and the men were straining at the leash.
The Blazing Valley. From the east came a glow of red silhouetting the fantastic Walt Disney shapes of the Kwangsi mountains—our subsidiary airfields were already burning. There came the rolling rumble over the hills as the bombs let go in distant runways. At our own field alone we had 550 buildings to blow. Our investment at this field came to 700,000,000 Chinese dollars ($70,000,000 U.S./>/>).
Our shacks and barracks were all tucked away into the clefts and flanks of the improbable hills. In each, demolition crews had set up a barrel of gasoline. A sergeant stood at the doorway with a carbine; someone else fixed his flashlight on the gasoline drum in the dark and the carbine fired—once, twice, three times. Gasoline trickled from the holed drums and its fumes filled the rooms. Then the sergeant would fire again, and the fumes would catch with a whooshing, explosive flash.
Sometimes thatched roofs would almost lift away in the flash, and fire would ripple through the buildings like racing water. Yellow and red and gold and white, white at the base and black at the smoke pinnacles, the fire would tear through the room. One by one the buildings went till the whole valley blazed.
In some of the shacks there was ammunition — rifle and pistol clips careless men had left behind. These popped everywhere. In one shack a store of tracer bullets went up in the air, casting white, blue and red arching pencils like Roman candles over all the hills.
It was almost dawn when we came to blow the fighter strip. There was grey over the hills and we were eating the last bacon & eggs at the table. Demolition bombs hammered the air above, beyond, all about us with their concussion. Sometimes the blast would be infinitesimal, other times it would catch and rock you.
I found Casey and Tex/>/> together, as I had always known them, packing in their room. There were six bottles of whiskey left and we took them along. Casey stuffed a useless pillow into his baggage. "My wife gave me that." he said. "I'll be damned if I leave it for the Japs." We all got into a car and drove down to the B25. Casey was pilot, Tex/>/> crouched behind him. We were off.
"I'm going to write a book about this campaign,'" Casey had told me once. "I'm going to call it Fire and Fall Back.' "
Our Defeat. We do not know here whether the Chinese can hold Kweilin/> or not. They are going to fight and thousands of them are going to die along the river, at barricades, in streets. Though Chinese will die, this is our campaign and in equal proportion our defeat. Here in this campaign the Japanese have combined a whole sheaf of objectives — a supply route safe from submarines; destruction of China/>'s best troops; a political blow at Chungking/> which will rock the regime to its foundations. But these were secondary considerations. What they wanted most of all was to get us: to get the nest of planes that had accounted for more than half a million tons of Japanese shipping, had killed Japs by the thousands.
We are not going to let them hold Kweilin/>, even if they take it. But now in this place and hour of defeat we know that this campaign has tacked six months on to the U.S./> war against Japan/>/>. They raided us at this base last night and we dozed in slit trenches. Somebody mentioned the fact that today the Navy landed in Palau/>/>. A captain stopped to chat with me this morning. I asked him whether he'd heard the news about Palau/>/>. "Palau/>/> is swell." he said, "But, God, they've got to hurry — they've got to hurry."
Sources: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,791636-3,00.html
