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Britain at Japan's request closes China's vital Burma Road, later reopens it. The U.S. continues to ship oil and gasoline for Japanese bombers. But Chiang goes on holding his two-thousand-mile front, trusting that the democracies will get around to helping him while there is still time for him to help them.
Not without reason has Chiang a sense of destiny. Said Dr. Sun Yatsen, whom Chiang once called "Teacher" and succeeded as leader of the Chinese revolution: "To save our country is also to save the world." Said Napoleon: "When China moves, she will move the world."
Simply and frankly, Chiang discusses all phases of the national struggle with the Chinese people—without concealments, without false optimism, without a misplaced sense of humor. When the Chinese Armies evacuated Wuhan in 1938, Chiang immediately explained the reasons:
"I wish you, our people, to have a clear understanding of the latest change in the war situation and of the consequences attendant upon the fall of Wuhan. From the beginning, our plan has been to establish the bases of our resistance not along the coast or rivers, or at the centers of communication, but in the vast interior."
Chiang never admits the possibility of defeat. After 18 months of bombings and thousand-mile retreats, he told the central committee of the Kuomintang: "From what I have said you can clearly see how Japan has worked her own ruin and has sealed her own doom. If Japan should emerge victorious in the present hostilities, then all existing military theories and principles of military strategy would be disproved. . . . We must fight to the end not only to upset the enemy's plan of a quick victory but also to prevent him from gaining a premature peace. This is now our only strategy. . . ."
With disloyalists like Japanese Puppet Wang Ching-wei and other questionable elements, China faces the fifth-column problem in an acute form, and Chiang is acutely conscious of it. He refers his people not to the fall of France but to Chinese history: "You should instruct our people to take lessons from the annals of the Sung and Ming Dynasties. The fall of these two dynasties was not caused by outside enemies with a superior force, but by a dispirited and cowardly minority in the governing class and the society of the time. . . . If we do not destroy ourselves, no outside force can destroy us." He warns: "It is easier to defeat the bandits in the mountains than to destroy the bandits in our hearts."
One result of the Battle of Russia may well be millions of Russian workers to swell the Nazi labor battalions; new Slav divisions to swell the Nazi Armies. Where can Britain and the U.S. turn for man power to offset this menacing mass? If Britain is democracy's European bastion, the U.S. democracy's arsenal, China is its untapped source of vast potential fighting power. Chiang's war messages make it clear that he has long been waiting for the democracies to see this point. If they do not, they can be sure that Hitler will, and one of Germany's elastic frontiers may soon be Chinese Turkestan.