In war-time when propaganda, subtly used, is almost as valuable a weapon to a country as a well-equipped army, exaggerations are accepted as rules of the game, The old motto of "telling the truth when you are winning, but keep quiet when you are not" has a sound basis of sense, but even this dogs not always meet the needs of particular cass. In the present Sino-Japanese hostilities all records in claims have been broken, and it is doubtful in the case of hostilities in future years if propagandists will ever be able to compete with the standards for astounding claims and exaggerations set in this unhappy conflict, Official Chinese Government agency claims regarding the number of casualties inflicted, prisoners taken and armies routed during the campaign against the Communists in recent years caused profound bewilderment among those attempting to keep some sort of record, but they were an amateurish prelude to the present hostilities. Take the case of the number of Chinese aeroplanes brought down by the Japanese and number of casualties inflicted, Lieut. Gen. Takamasa Izeki, who recently returned to Japan from Korea after a tour of North China, must have astounded his interviewers and also the archivists at the Tokyo War Offüce, when he gave his estimates of the situation. According to a telegram from Shimonoseki, Lieut-Gen. Izeki said that 1,000 Chinese aeroplanes had been shot down in North China since the start of the hostilities and that Chinese casualties in that area were 1,000,000. It is to be presumed that in making these remarks he was cognisant of the two geographical divisions of the campaign in China with the North China forces under General Terauchi, and the Central China forces under General Hata thus roughly dividing equally the territory controlled by the two armies. If so the statement becomes even more fantastic for only a few weeks ago Tokyo officially announced that 600 odd Chinese aeroplanes had been brought down or destroyed. These figures of aeroplane casualties alone, ignoring how many machines may be still effective—and they have been around Hankow—gives China an air force which even a wealthy country like Great Britain, embarking on an air re-armament programme on a colossal scale, would envy and finds dif-cult to exceed numerically, A tour of America, one of the greatest potential suppliers, produced only 400 machines to augment production from the greatly expanded aeroplane industry in Britain and where China has only a few million dollars to spend Britain has millions of pounds The fact is that imagination has been allowed io run riot, There never was that number, or even anything approaching that number of aeroplanes in China. If claims to the destruction of even 300 machines were made it might be nearer the mark, although Chinese say this is an over-estimate. A large number of grounded planes destroyed in. raids on aerodromes has been generously added to the list of casualties whereas it is known that Chinese ingenuity in constructing dummy planes as targets for Japanese bombs has accounted for much of this destruction, It is just a question of exaggeration.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.