China and the West

Hemingway, Ernest. Chinese build air field. In : PM ; June 18 (1941).
Manila.—Nelson Johnson, the last U.S. Ambassador to Chungking, who lived in China so long that he talked like an elder Chinese statesman and who never took a view shorter than 3000 years, told me as we stood looking out from the new spring green of the U.S. Embassy terrace across the fast running Yangtze River to the rising bulk of the terraced, gray, bomb-spattered, fire-gutted, grim stone island that is China's war-time capital:
"China can do anything that China wants to do."
At the time this remark irritated me profoundly. Unlike Mr. Johnson, I had never seen the Great Wall and I suppose I could not think of it as something that had been built just a few days or years before. I was thinking in immediate terms: how much money it would cost to tie up how many Japanese divisions in China; what were the offensive possibilities for the Chinese Army; could friction between the Communists and the Kuomintang be reduced so they found again a common basis for fighting against Japan; how many planes were needed before China could take the offensive and who would fly them; how many pieces of artillery were absolutely necessary and how were they to be got in; and how many gunner officers were fit to handle them when and if they were got in; and about several other things.
When Mr. Johnson brought that remark up out of the depth of his learning I was moderately appalled. It did not seem to help much on the immediate solution of many grave problems. Two days later I flew up to Chengtu in north Szechwan Province where the caravans come down from Tibet and you walk past yellow and red lamas in the dust-deep streets of the old high-walled city; the dust blowing gray in clouds with the cold wind down from the snowy mountains and you have to wear a handkerchief over your face and step into a silver-beater's shop as the caravans pass. Up there in the north I found out what Mr. Johnson meant, and I saw something that made me know what it would have been like to have ridden some early morning up from the south out of the desert and seen the great camp and the work that went on when men were building on the pyramids.
It started with the Generalissimo talking about Flying Fortresses. With some of those big four-motor Boeings the Chinese could fly over Japan at an altitude where neither Japanese antiaircraft nor pursuit could bother them and bring to Japan the horror that she had spread through China in the past four years. There were no Chinese who were qualified to be checked out on a Flying Fortress as pilots, but none of those present brought that up. That was a thing which could presumably be arranged later. Someone did point out, though, that there was not a single airfield in China which could handle a Boeing B17.
At this point in the conversation the Generalissimo made a note.
"What do they weigh?" he asked.
"Around 22 tons," someone told him with more or less accuracy.
"Not over that?" asked the Generalissimo.
"No. But I will check."
The next day the construction of the airfield began.
Chen Loh-kwan, 38-year-old engineering graduate of the University of Illinois and chief of the Engineering Department of the Aeronautical Commission, was ordered to complete an airfield ready to receive Flying Fortresses on March 30. There was an "or else" added to the order, but Chen Loh-kwan has built so many airfields in a hurry for the Generalissimo that if they ever "or elsed" him it would be probably much the simplest solution to the hundreds of thousands of problems he has solved and has to go on solving. He never worries about "or elses."
He had from January 8 to March 30 to build an airfield with a runway a mile and an eighth long by a little over 150 yards wide with a stone-filling and top dressing macadam runway five feet deep to support the giant bombers when they land or take off.
Chen Loh-kwan's task was to level a 1000-acre field without tools; first removing 1,050,000 cubic meters of earth by hand and transporting it in baskets an average distance of half a mile. He built his runway with a yard deep layer of stone, then a layer of watered earth, then another layer of stone. This stone was all hauled in baskets from the bed of a river which flowed along from half a mile to a mile away. This runway foundation was surfaced with three layers. One was a layer of boulders set in lime mortar. Above this was a layer of lime concrete. On top of it all, in a biiliard-table-rolled-smooth surface, was an inch and a half of broken stone clay bound covered with one inch of coarse sand.
There is blind drainage all around the edge of the runway which will support, when I saw it,.five tons of load per square foot and will handle bombers as big as the new B19.
Chen Loh-kwan built—that is he built moulds for rollers and poured them—150 three-and-a-half-to ten-ton concrete rollers to smooth off this job. They were all pulled by manpower. One of the finest things I ever saw was that manpower pulling.
He brought in water in two ditches from ten miles away to parallel the runway during the construction to save hauling water. The workers mixed all the concrete by puddling it with their feet.
Sixty thousand workers at one time were hauling the 220,000 cubic meters of gravel from eight miles along the river. Thirty-five thousand more workers were crushing stone with hand hammers. There were 5000 wheelbarrows in use at a time and 200,000 baskets slung on carrying sticks. Every carrying stick was bent to breaking point under a double load as the men worked 12-hour shifts.
The Governor of Szechwan Province provided Chen Loh-an with 100,000 workers. They came in bands of 800 from the 10 different counties of the province. Some had to march 15 days from their homes. They were paid on the basis that a man can cut up to a meter and a quarter of earth a day. This was adjudged to be worth 40 ounces of rice. The man working received three-fifths of this in rice and the balance in cash. It worked out to about $2.30 a day Chinese, or $1 a day Chinese and rice.
The first I saw of the workers was a cloud of dust coming down the road with a ragged, torn-clothed, horny-footed, pockfaced army marching in the blowing dust singing as they plodded with their torn flags snapping in the wind.
We passed another band that jammed a village as they sang, boasted, and bought food for the night and then we came up on a rise and saw the field.
Looking across the great, stretching earth-leveled expanse, it looked at first like some ancient battlefield with the banners waving and the clouds of dust rolling where 80,000 men were toiling. Then you could make out the long cement-whitening mile-and-an-eighth runway and the 100-man teams that were rolling it smooth as they dragged the lo-ton rollers back and forth.
Through all the dust, the clicking of breaking rock and the hammering, there was a steady undertone of singing as of surf breaking on a great barrier reef.
"What is that song?" I asked.
"It is only what they sing," the engineer told me. "It is a song they sing that makes them happy."
"What does it say?"
"It says that they work all day and all night to do this. They work all day and all night. The rock is big. They make it small. The earth was soft. They make it hard."
"Go on," I said.
"The field was uneven and they make it smooth. They make the runway smooth as metal and the rollers are light to their shoulders. The roller has no weight because all men pull it together." "What do they sing now?"
"Now we have done what we can do. Now come the Flying Fortresses. Now-we-have-done-what-we-can-do! Now-come-the- Flying-Fortresses!"
"You can send somebody who can fly them," an engineer said. He was a very practical man, used to building airfields without tools and with no false illusions.
"You see," he looked across at the wind-blowing glory of the field where the singing was beating like surf, "there are certain things that we can do ourselves."
It was close to the end of the deadline and the field would be ready on the date that had been set.