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For Help "Short of War"

China Should Be Given Every Assistance as Our Ally, a Reader Urges

To the New York Herald Tribune:

The appointment of Sing Kee, a local restaurant owner, as a member of New York's Draft Board, No. 1, the overwhelming Chinese response to the draft registration and the recent selection in the draft lottery of two Chinese as the first American citizens to be called in New York and Chicago, points up a fact none tool well known; namely, that the American citizens of Chinese ancestry are 100 per cent [[percent]] behind the President in his efforts to mobilize this nation for resistance against totalitarian aggression.

There is no doubt, if we are to judge by the heroic example of Sing Kee himself, that given the privilege of service these Chinese-Americans will make excellent soldiers. Twentythree [[Twenty three]] years ago, in the first world war. Sing Kee won the Distinguished Service Cross. Surrounded by attacking German troops he stuck to his signal corps post, sending messages to the American military headquarters giving the enemy's position until his wireless apparatus was shot away. Let it be noted that Sing Kee was only one of the hundreds of other Chinese in the American Army who performed equally devoted service.

Time is of the very essence of national existence in these perilous times. According to the tragic pages of recent history, once proud and great nations have been crushed to ruin and ignominy not in years of even months, but in days and hours. What would be of greater enlightened self-interest than for the United States to offer China, her ally by virtue of her long struggle for the same cause of democracy, every assistance short of war? It would appear therefore equally, if not far more, important at this juncture to lend greater assistance to the Chinese armies now fighting in the field against America's potential enemy, Japan, than it is for the United States to draft all her man power [[manpower]], which will require years to train.

Impartial military observers are agreed that the systematic and large-scale assistance to China of the types now given Britain will make it possible not only for China to exhaust but to defeat Japan. With Japan taken care of, America need not worry about her western front, which is the Pacific, but can concentrate all her energies and resources on resisting Hitler in Europe. Thus far, China's armies of 3,000,000 trained soldiers, considering their woeful lack of modern fighting equipment, have performed prodigious feats of valor. They have demonstrated, beyond peradventure, that battles can be fought and won with nothing more than fortitude. How else can we explain her magnificent resistance? Where Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium and Holland have fallen under the heel of the aggressor in nine short months, China, after three long years, still fights on-unconquered. The only possible answer for this totally unexpected phenomenon is that China fights invaders as the American Revolutionists fought the War of Independence-with flaming conviction that their cause is just one and is worth dying for. 

Since this war is a world war and a totalitarian one, the same generous voluntary private, as well as governmental, assistance given to the English should be rendered to the Chinese people. May we not as individuals and as groups join in urging our President and Congress to work more actively to assist China, the one other nation in the world besides Great Britain, which fights America's battle?

Surely, no American can deny that China has done this country a great turn. Bu holding off Japan she has allowed the United States to make adequate military preparations. It is high time, I believe for the United States to show her gratitude. Only by prompt, effective and full military, civilian and diplomatic co-operation with her beleaguered sister democracies, China and Great Britain, can the United States hope to preserve her own freedom and independence.   PARDEE LOWE.
New York, Nov. 4, 1940