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.