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Next day at 3:30 p.m. a Chinese squadron which had flown 90 miles toward Shanghai engaged 50 Japanese planes on their way to bomb Nanking and fought them so fiercely that they turned back. It was plain as a pikestaff that Japan's airmen had failed either to break Chinese morale at Nanking or to win mastery of the air over the capital. In guarded dispatches Nanking correspondents announced that "mystery planes" and "mystery anti-aircraft guns" were being added to the defenses of Nanking, and the dispatches said these "did not come from the Soviet Union" although Japanese editors hotly charged that they did.
Real American Sentiments? In Nanking at her desk in the Air Ministry, which she virtually manages, was the wife of China's Generalissimo, deeply pious and distinctly pretty Mme Chiang Kaishek. Her husband was away inspecting the Shanghai front on the day of Japan's first air raid, but he was back in Nanking for all the raids, sky-fighting, fires and bombing which followed on successive days.
Prudent, the Chinese Generalissimo kept his exact whereabouts as secret as possible, but correspondents were spirited to him at intervals for interviews which kept proving to the world that he was still in Nanking and by their logic much distressed such good souls as U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Citing the Nine-Power Washington Treaty by which the U. S., Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and The Netherlands stand pledged to respect the sovereignty, independence and territorial and administrative integrity of China, Generalissimo Chiang said: "I believe that the present attitude of the United States Government toward the China crisis does not represent the real sentiments or attitude of the American people. . . . Chinese-American friendship being so traditional, and China being bled as she is by an aggressor, I believe the United States ultimately will live up to its obligations under the Nine-Power Pact. So long as the Nine-Power Pact stands, America cannot take an attitude of neutrality toward the present Japanese war of aggression."
Power Dive. Next day Japanese hurled 80 bombers at Nanking in their biggest raid of the year, raised the week's total of Nanking citizens killed to above 500 and finally succeeded in destroying the Chinese capital's $1,000,000 electric power plant in one of the most spectacular maneuvers of the air war. To make sure his 500-lb. bombs did not miss, the Japanese squadron leader went into an absolutely vertical power dive directly above the plant, let go his bombs at the last agonizing moment when his plane seemed hurtling into the chimneys, then pulled out of his dive and miraculously escaped a score of barking anti-aircraft guns. At latest dispatches the wrecked electric plant was a burnt-out shell, Japanese had bombed two Chinese hospitals, each of which displayed a huge Red Cross, and Nanking's waterworks had been put out of commission, while Japan pressed her war from Suiyuan to Canton in raids and battles dotted clear across China (see below).