The longest city walls in China, built in large part by the early Ming Emperors, encircle the strange city of Nanking. Seven times it has been the capital of Chinese dynasties, as it is today the capital of the republic, and Nanking was old when Jesus was a babe in Bethlehem. Whole districts inside the capital's walls are open fields, dotted here and there with ruined bridges that once spanned rivulets which no longer exist. Down by the Bund fronting the Yangtze River lives a large community of Nanking's 500,000 Chinese people, pack-jammed into squalid, odorous huts. Dotted on impressive sites connected by fine boulevards are shining, splendorous government buildings all completed since China's present leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, set up his regime at Nanking which means "Southern Capital," abandoning Peking, the "Northern Capital" which Japanese captured this year. Last week there had already been sixteen Japanese air raids over Nanking when the Commander in Chief of the Japanese Navy in China, Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa, announced a series of super-bombings to wipe the capital of China from the map.
Japanese editors praised Admiral Hasegawa for "his Samurai-like and knightly attitude" in giving advance warning to the foe. Since in modern times accepted Japanese strategy has been a knife-in-the-back thrust without warning, the Samurai-Admiral appeared almost a freak. To get to Nanking before the deadline he had set for its destruction last week, U. S. correspondents and cameramen leaped into any kind of car they could hire at Shanghai, tore off over 160 miles of road so rough that a jagged rock punctured the crankcase of one car. Nimbly the Chinese chauffeur repaired it with a piece of chamois skin and a can opener, dashed on with his cargo of foreign devils bound for the scene of advertised atrocities.
"Too Unhappy to Speak!" Japan's eccentric Samurai-Admiral had strongly advised foreigners and their diplomats to seek safety by clearing out of Nanking last week, this knightly advice constituting in the eyes of Western states just about the most brazen piece of Japanese nose-thumbing yet at international law. In Nanking the forehanded Soviet Ambassador, Comrade Dmitry Vasilievich Bogomolov and his Embassy staff at once retired into their new $12,000 concrete dugout, equipped with an icebox and kitchenette and supposed to be able to withstand even a direct hit by a 500-lb. bomb.
Already wounded by Japanese airmen and in the hospital at Shanghai was British Ambassador Knatchbull-Hugessen (TIME, Sept. 27), but British Charge d'Affaires R. G. Howe decided to stick at his post in Nanking. This left U. S. Ambassador Nelson T. Johnson, a longtime Far East veteran who has made tramps and treks in bandit-infested Provinces "just for fun," staring at the standing orders which the U. S. Embassy, Legation and Consulate has recently received under the New Deal. These orders force the ranking U. S. official on the spot to decide what in his judgment constitutes "unnecessary risk" for himself and staff.
"I am too unhappy to speak," Ambassador Johnson told Associated Press. "This is the first time in 30 years I have been forced to leave my post. . . . I cannot risk the lives of the loyal men of my staff. I am not deserting."