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Show Japanese Troops, Chinese Farmers Work Side by Side to Stem Flood BY ROBERT BELLAIRE C SHANGHAI, June 15 (U.l?) Japanese Jap-anese troops halted their war against the Chinese today to fight the Yellow river floods. Japanese estimated that 150,000 Chinese civilians had been drowned. drown-ed. They admitted that many thousands of their own men were trapped, and the flood was only beginning. The muddy waters poured through dyke breaks that at some points were miles long, and steadily were becoming longer. They swamped the central China pla:'.i whlcii even at normal times is often between 15 and 30 feet below the river bed-Over bed-Over miles of territory, the Japanese troops, all thought of their triumphant drive for Hankow Han-kow forgotten, worked night and I day in relays side by side with sweating Chinese farmers, trying to patch up the dykes. But even the Japanese admitted that their work seemed useless. The current of the river was becoming be-coming stronger each hour, fed by rains which had been falling steadily for weeks in the war west. Japanese aviators, flying over the Yellow river basin, saw nothing noth-ing for miles but the swirling, muddy waters or an enemy more powerful than the Chinese who had fought them for almost a year. "Hopeless1' "The battlefields on which wc fought are under water," a Japanese Jap-anese army spokesman said. "The J roads are submerged. Great areas i of countryside, even entire villages, vil-lages, are under water. We are i doing all we can to repair the S , . dykes. But i't looks hopeless." Chinese army units, fighting as Guerrillas in independent detachments, detach-ments, saw "the river now the river which they call China's sorrow and the scourge of the sons of Han as an ally. At this crisis in their history, no enemy was as nated as Japan. The guerrilla units harassed the Japanese Jap-anese who were working on the dykes, and gave them no rest. Day and night, they crept up to attack isolated parties. Say Deliberate Japanese charged that at many points the Chinese still were deliberately de-liberately breaking the dykes, to send new torrents gushing down onto the plain. . It was disclosed also that in areas not actually flooded, the : mud from the rains had all but immobilized the Japanese. |