Twice during the stay in the war zone the newspaper men practiced the art of bomb dodging under the grim reality of the missiles which city dwellers heard thudding early yesterday afternoon out west. Beating hasty retreats, they passed soldiers who had been entombed by those explosions, down on their haunches beside the Soochow creek washing plaster and blood from their Here was the war of the these stoics who had stared clean in the face minutes earlier could still grin up at the urgent departure of the foreign excursionists into their no-man's-land.
The excursion began (under the dismal augury of night rising and the 22 men who reported to the even more genial than usual secretary to the Government of Greater Shanghai, Mr. T. Y. Chang before six am. blinked unhappily like owls surprised by the dawn. The start was not auspicious. Firstly, U. S. Marine Corps officers briskly belying a night-long vigil, had not heard about the party (and the Chinese soldiers mounting the opposite side of the bridge had, and then the position was reversed with annoying delays that caused the deflection back to their beds of five of the scribes, The creek finally crossed, the men headed into Chapei with the sun up nearly two hours. They passed a bridge carrying 10,000 Ib. of high explosive and noted that at the end of the release wire was enough grass rope to put about 400 yards between explosion and exit point. The path led through a maze of alleyways with defence works at every conceivable point.
Here was no mark of shelling or bombing, but the sacrifice to defence had taken almost as great a toll in roadways everywhere turned into trenches and walls demolished to link the labyrinth of lanes. Movie cameras hummed at the first walking wounded limped around a corner The second trek ended in the yards of the North Station where two months of bombing had smashed island platforms, the station approaches and the tracks of the rail head to pulverized metal and masonry. Ahead, the Administration Building loomed up hugely. Bombs and shells hed caused vast craters in its compounds, and buildings for hundreds of yards around had been reduced to great mounds of splintered woodwork. The structure had been completely ringed by projectiles in the effort to drive out the ground floor defenders with showers of steel. Inside, the safe floor space had become a dormitory for about fifty men with well blanket ted iron bedsteads closely spaced, The spirits of these soldiers seemed to have been deadened by the perpetual concussions and the life in semidarkness caused by the barrackaded windows. Floor upon floor was in complete chaos on the "weather" end, burst by shells, blackened by fire.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.