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Show i s News ftx THENEW53 By PaulMallon Released by Western Newspaper Union. CHINESE CABINET CHANGE WILL AID WAR WASHINGTON. All the news from China has been bad lately, excepting ex-cepting Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Kai-shek's thorough shaking out of his cabinet. From the Inside, it appears that the generalissimo, having been 1 instrumental In ousting our General Gen-eral Stilwell and thus having saved face with his own people for the mil-itarr mil-itarr failures, is now getting ready to cooperate more closely with the other United Nations. Na-tions. At least Generalissimo this IS what might Chiang Kai-shek , , . be termed the Inner In-ner official view here. The motives behind the Stilwell Stil-well withdrawal, unexplained at the time, thns now become more fully evident. The whole panoply of mystifying news from that front thus becomes apparent. Chiang has always been suspicious suspi-cious of the Chinese Communists. Commu-nists. While they are fighting on his side with their armies far off In the north, he actually has had soldiers detached from his own war effort on the Japanese front to watch them. True, the Communists have not been much of a deterrent to the Japs. While some published esti-. esti-. mates of their strength run as high as 300,000, numbers are worthless in gauging any Chinese fighting forces. No one knows exactly how many troops the Commies have, except that these have been sufficient to repel a few Jap attacks. Many whom they count as soldiers are actually ac-tually farmers who run to action in an emergency. Others are untrained civilians, and the term "bandit" has been applied to a few in the past. ' Now by kicking from his cabinet the strongest anti-Communist elements, ele-ments, Chiang is falling in line with the ideas of officialdom here for more coherent action on that front. However, the change can be interpreted in-terpreted as more political than military mil-itary so far. Improved Leadership. Those who know the new war minister min-ister say they expect his leadership to bring some "improvement" in Chinese fighting, but very few people peo-ple in this country appreciate the difficulties he is facing. Frankly, it must now be said that no satisfactory Chinese military effort ef-fort has developed anywhere lately. The action on the Salween river front may be an exception, but there we trained the officers and men. It is time to admit also that China is mostly in Jap hands. All of the industry and much of the agriculture agricul-ture went long ago. The seacoast is closed. Most of the internal railroads rail-roads are controlled by the Japs. We are today flying in from India through the only contact the Chinese have with the outside out-side world more materials of war than were carried on the Burma road before the Japs cut it. But our planes flying in a load of gasoline for instance probably consume con-sume as much as they can carry as a load. The limitations upon our assistance as-sistance are therefore evident, and likely to continue indefinitely, although al-though we have greatly increased our supplies in the last five months. Then again we must recognize that her armies are sometimes led by what we used to call "provincial war lords," many of whom are politicians pol-iticians not strictly supporting the Chungking government. The Chinese internal economic distribution system has not improved im-proved much since before the war, when news of vast starvation starva-tion was a world sensation almost al-most annually. Inflation is unbelievable, un-believable, and indeed most authorities au-thorities suspect China cannot survive financially even if peace comes soon. Certainly the central cen-tral government is none too sure of itself. But as these internal inefficiencies, inefficien-cies, dissensions and weaknesses are native to the Chinese, so also has been their cold, valorous spirit of resistance against the conqueror. While the difficulties practically amount now to internal demoralization, demoraliza-tion, they are not likely to lead to a collapse of the fight on that front. The Jap drive in China luckily is limited. All advices here prove rather rath-er conclusively that the Jap strategy is directed only toward cutting central cen-tral China off from Burma if it can be done. But even if this mission mis-sion is accomplished, they will then have long lines of communications running back to the coast. Such extensions are really invitations invi-tations for the special type of fight- ing the Chinese do best. Chiang is I not sufficiently equipped for battle, indeed could not proiect five or six of our valuable airfields which have ' now been lost |
