Word: changsha
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...Japanese Army wants the city of Changsha badly, has wanted it for three years. Capital of Hunan Province, Changsha dominates highway and rail communications south of the Yangtze, is the center of some of the richest rice country in the world (TIME, Sept. 22). Twice the Japanese have tried to seize it; twice they have failed. The city was burned once-by the Chinese themselves, on the strength of a false rumor that the Japanese were on the city's outskirts. Last week the Japanese made their third try for Changsha, and had a good chance of getting...
...third year, summer of 1939, opened with spectacular Chinese victories in Shansi Province. The Japanese shook up their high command and started a face-saving drive on Changsha. Their faces were slapped instead, in what Chungking called "the biggest single victory of the war." Desperate, the Japanese undertook a surprise attack, this time successful, on Nanning, in order to cut down on the flow of munitions from French Indo-China into China. This was a serious blow to the Chinese. The fall of Ichang early this month gave the Japanese a convenient base for new and heavier-than-ever bombing...
...hope of China's survival lay in such trained men. In that first summer of the war, China's Education Ministry secretly sent students to Tientsin, Peking, other university centres, through them transmitted instructions to the nation's undergraduates. Some were to gather inland at Changsha, others were to filter through enemy lines to Sian. Thousands of students gathered at these rendezvous, made shift to study while they awaited further orders. In the spring of 1938 the orders came. Then began one of history's strangest migrations-an orderly retreat of China's civilization...
...Changsha group had as their destination Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, in southwestern China. Some went by bus, some by junk and river steamer, some by rail, most on foot, in squads led by their professors. In Nanking, 1,086 students of National Central University, four times bombed, loaded boats with their books, laboratory equipment and machines from their shops, set out up the Yangtze. They arrived at Chungking, 1,000 miles away, after 43 days. (Their agricultural school's herd of blooded cattle, driven along the river banks, got there a year later.) More spectacular still...
They crushed the Japanese feeler which crept out in May attempting to command the northern approaches to Chungking, with Hanchung (see map) as its ultimate objective. They did the same to a September drive for Changsha, key to Chungking's southern approaches. And they made a bloody, muddy fiasco of a Japanese "cleanup" campaign in supposedly occupied Shansi Province in the north...