Major General Claire L. Chennault to President Roosevelt 35
Dear Mr. President: My last report was so pessimistic that I feel obliged to send you another. In six weeks of fighting, with less than 150 aircraft and inadequate supplies, my men in East China have destroyed a good part of the transport and crippled the supply of eight Japanese divisions and two brigades, incidentally killing or disabling more than 15,000 Japanese troops. With their supply crippled, the attacking Japanese have lost momentum at Hengyang. General Hsueh Yo has rallied his armies, organized a determined defense of Hengyang, and fallen upon the flanks of the enemy. The Japanese time-table has thus been seriously upset, and owing to the achievement of my men in the East, which I can only describe as a near-miracle, we have a definite chance to save East China.
The danger is still very great, however. In the Hengyang area, the Japanese have suffered only a reverse, and not the real defeat we might have inflicted upon them with greater means at our disposal. The Generalissimo has just ordered a greatly intensified counter-attack by his armies, to begin tomorrow. This may perhaps turn the reverse into a defeat, but at the very moment when our air support of the Chinese should also be intensified, our own road supply line Eastwards has broken down. I have been pleading for more than a year to have this supply line strengthened in order to guard against just such an emergency as the present one, but the necessary [Page 128] measures were first so long delayed, and then taken so half-heartedly, as to be almost fruitless. Thus the outcome in the Hengyang area is still uncertain. At the same time, the five Japanese divisions in the Canton area are now also on the move, requiring me to divide the air effort in the East, It would be a disheartening outlook, if so much more had not already been accomplished than could be reasonably expected.
Although the Japanese have not yet been decisively defeated, I consider that the accomplishment to date in the Hengyang fighting affords clear proof of my theories of the China war. A force of 150 aircraft can cripple the supply and halt the progress of nine enemy divisions, incidentally inflicting the astonishing total of over ten per cent of actual cusualties on the enemy, because of the extreme vulnerability of the Japanese supply lines and routes of advance. If East China is saved, I hope this lesson will be learned and applied in the planning of our future effort in this theater. For the difference between the Japanese spearhead at Hengyang, and their great, permanent spearhead in the Yangtsze Valley, is a difference of scale only. And whenever we are given the stuff to do the job, I am confident we can drive the enemy from the Yangtsze Valley as we could already have driven them from Hengyang with a little more fuel and a few more aircraft.
With warm personal regards [etc.]
- Copy obtained from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N. Y.↩