LARGE JAP FORCES

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 136, 11 June 1945, Page 5

LARGE JAP FORCES

CUT OFF BY OFFENSIVE

CHUNGKING, June 9,

The Chinese, strengthening their steel wedge across Japan's South-east Asia corridor, have doomed more than 200,000 enemy troops to slow death byattrition and starvation in South China, Indo-China, and Malaya, says a correspondent of the United Press. The land lifeline of the Japanese has been broken beyond repair, their planes are helpless, and their sea supply lanes are tightly blockaded. These Japanese are believed to have no chance of regaining normal contact with the armies in North China and Japan. Chinese authorities have stated that the Japanese are now swiftly pulling in their lines along the vast China front and concentrating in four main defensive areas —North China, Shanghai. Hankow, and Canton. The southeastern corridor has been broken along a 150-mile front from a point near the Indo-China border to near Liuchow, but the Japanese still hold a salient running 50 miles westward of Ishan, where the Chinese are at present fighting through the suburbs. The Chinese finally cleared Tatangyu, 28 miles south-west of Liuchow. BLASTED CITY. The Japanese are battling stubbornly to retain Paoking, in Hunan Province, where American planes have virtually blasted the city off the map, but the Japanese have burrowed under the debris and are at present holding the! Chinese off in the suburbs. A Chinese spokesman said that while the main Japanese forces in Honan were slowly pulling out eastward to a new defence line along the Peking-Hankow rr.ilway, the enemy was waging fierce holding actions along the old front.

The Chinese High Command announced that the Chinese captured Chungchingfu, on the Indo-China border.' The Japanese fled to Caobang, 19 miles to the south-west.

A Chinese communique reports that the Chinese east of Hunan recaptured Kushui, 18 miles west of Siang-siang. which guards the enemy-held upper stretches of the Hankow-Canton railway. The Japanese suffered about 200 casualties. The remnants are fleeing to Siang-siang.