China and the West

Hemingway, Ernest. Japan cannot beat China's army Chiang's need of an Air Force 2. In : The Advertiser ; 4 July (1941).
JAPAN has lost, temporarily, her chance of making peace with China. The second thing you can count on in the Far East is that Japan can never conquer China. The simplest way to explain the present military stalemate is to point out that Japan has conquered all of the flat country where her superiority in planes, artillery, and mechanised formations has given her a tremendous advantage. She must now fight the Chinese in mountain country, much of it road- less, where the Chinese meet the Japanese on more equal terms. The Chinese have an enormous army of 200 first-line divisions (over 2,000,000 men), who are exceedingly well armed for the type of war they are fighting now. They also have another million men in not so good divisions, they have three Communist divisions, and probably half a million Communist irregulars. who are trained in guerilla warfare.
PLENTY OF RIFLES
CHINA has ample supplies of rifles, plenty of ammunition, excellent heavy and light machine- guns and automatic rifles, and ample supplies of ammunition manufactured in Chinese arsenals for all these arms. Each Chinese battalion has a mortar company of six 81-millimetre mortars, which are extremely accurate at 2,000 yards, and have an extreme range of 3,000 yards. This is not hearsay. I saw the mortars used many times at the front, and they were excellent weapons used with great skill. This 81-millimetre mortar is the French Brandt, and the Chinese can drop a shell with it on a set of diapers at 2.000 yards. In the mountains it makes up enormously for their lack of artillery. The Chinese are also building an 82- millimetre mortar of their own, copied almost exactly from the Brandt. It is practically as accurate, but a couple of hundred yards shorter in its extreme range. In the regular Chinese divisions the discipline is of the extremist Prussian model. The death penalty starts with stealing, interfering with the people, insubordination, and goes on through all the usual army crimes.
STRICT DISCIPLINE
THE Chinese have also a few innovations, such as an entire section being shot if the section leaders advance and the section cannot get its legs moving; and there are other advancements in the art of making a soldier know that death is certain from behind and only possible from in front. If we take the German idea of an army as an ideal, the best Chinese Central Government troops are very close to it. They know the trade of soldiering, they travel fast, they eat little compared to European troops, they are not afraid of death, and they have the best of the inhuman qualities that make a man a good soldier. The Chinese medical service is fairly lamentable. One of the greatest difficulties is caused by the doctors' dislike of being near the fighting. They say that, as it takes a long time and much money to produce a doctor, it is unjust and un-reasonable to expect such an expensive and rare product to be exposed to possible extermination by enemy projectiles. As a result, by the time Chinese wounded see a doctor, it would often have been kinder to have shot them where they fell. The head of the Chinese Red Cross unit in the field, Dr. Robert Lim, has done much to change this conception of the doctor's role in the war. But the Chinese medical service is still far from perfect. The troops of the Central Government have had no publicity. The Communists have welcomed good writers, and have been well written up. Three million other men have died to oppose Japan without getting adequate press cuttings. Anyone who says or writes that the troops of the Central Government armies are not a magnificently disciplined, well-trained, well-officered, and excellently-armed defensive force has never seen them at the front.
AIR FORCE WEAKNESS
THERE are many things needed before the troops can take the offensive on any large scale. They also face certain grave problems; but you can bet, no matter what you may hear, that, if the Central Government has money to pay, feed, and continue to arm them, they are not going to be defeated by the Japanese this year, nor next year, nor the year after. Nor, if you want my absolute opinion, having seen the terrain, the problems involved, and the troops who will do the fighting, will the Japanese ever defeat the Chinese Army unless it is sold out. As long as America is putting up the money to pay and arm them, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is in, command, the Chinese will not be sold out. But if America ceased to back them, or if anything ever happened to the Generalissimo, they would be sold out very quickly. The main drawback to the Chinese Army taking the offensive is its lack of a competent Air Force and of artillery.