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teased. The cook had promptly disappeared over the garden fence into a hole, dug by the servants in the hillside during the past few days, but the boy was made of stouter stuff and continued to wait on us at table. Morale, however, crumbled when a crashing inferno opened up all round and each scuttled into the nearest corner, soon to emerge under the embarrassing discovery that it was only the anti-aircraft guns. The boy issued from the linen cupboard and went to doff his white coat and put on a black mackintosh overcoat and waterproof cap, so that "Japanese no can see", as he explained.
On August 15th there was only one raid, but the very next day there were three raids and no less than six alerts. Each alert would last up to two hours, as it took time to check whether all enemy aircraft had left the zone, so that on that day and some of the succeeding days there was an almost continuous state of alarm. This was most inconvenient, because as soon as the alert went the Chinese police strictly stopped all road traffic and you had to stay where you were. That day we were unable to get home to lunch. We thereafter kept a reserve of food at the office against contingencies. Fortunately later on the Japanese developed the habit for a time of raiding in the morning and again in the afternoon, leaving a good long interval for lunch, for which mercy we were duly grateful.
The Japanese airforce by no means had it all their own way. In the initial raids they sent their bombers over without escort, and the Chinese fighter pilots, trained by the American Mission headed by Colonel Chennault and equipped with Curtis Hawk pursuit planes, had the legs off them and shot down many. The Chinese Ministry of Information organised tours for the foreign newspaper correspondents to review the remains of the destroyed enemy bombers, and it was not long before the Japanese took to raiding by night to avoid casualties. Later on, when they had occupied an airfield near Shanghai, they were able to send fighter escorts with their bombers. In November a few Russian planes and crews arrived and took up the battle, and in all I should say by mid-December, when Nanking fell, not less than 300 Japanese planes had been destroyed. For those days that was no mean achievement, but by then the Chinese airforce, unable to replace casualties to pilots and aircraft, had shot its bolt.
On land at Shanghai, though they failed in their objective of driving the Japanese into the river, the two German-trained Chinese divisions