Word: cantonment
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week, half of Canton's population had fled. The broad avenues were piled high with debris, thousands of hovels were leveled and the city looked like a human slaughterhouse. Japanese bombers, apparently operating from an off-sea base near the Portuguese colony of Macao, for the third successive week streaked bombs down on Canton in almost daily raids. To Canton's symphony of stenches was added another last week-that of dead, decaying flesh, intensified by sweltering heat. Rescue workers, handkerchiefs over their nostrils, scrabbled in the ruins to drag out the injured, could give no account...
Japan's objectives in bombing Canton are: 1) destruction of the city's military defenses and crushing the southern terminus of the Hankow-Canton railway, China's main pipeline for supplies now pouring in through Britain's Crown Colony of Hong Kong. 90 miles south of Canton at the mouth of the Pearl River; 2) the demoralization of the civilian population. By the end of last week the first had not been achieved-Chinese anti-aircraft batteries still blazed away at the bombers, stores of munitions were still intact, and the vital railway was still open...
...Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall) was blasted. Bombs fell in the grounds of the U. S.-owned Lingnan University, the oldest Christian college in South China, and ripped out a side of the French Paul Doumer Hospital, just across the narrow canal from the island of Shameen, Canton's foreign concession. Bombers power-dived over the settlement, built on a reclaimed sandbar, and released their loads directly above in order to plump them into the populous Chinese West Bund. Settlement police stood guard to beat back any Chinese who might plunge across the narrow canal...
...week's end the Canton bombings slackened as Chinese anti-aircraft batteries found their range, and 14 U. S.-made planes arrived to aid the Chinese defenses. In Yunnanfu, 900 miles to the west, ten French free-lance fliers, using new high-speed French Dewoitine pursuit planes. formed a battle squadron which may be called to take the air over Canton...
From Hankow last week came disturbing reports of dissension between Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his military aides. Chief dissenter was General Li Tsung-jen, powerful military leader of Kwangsi, a South China province neighboring Canton, who patched up his long-standing quarrel with the Generalissimo when hostilities started eleven months ago. In the tortuous back-stepping before the Japanese the Generalissimo has repeatedly pulled his own crack German-trained divisions from the front lines first, leaving the raw, ill-equipped mass of his army, largely composed of provincial troops, to cover the retreat. This, coupled with Chiang...