Word: chennault
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...hesitation was over. The enemy had completed the road south from Changsha to Hengyang; he had made progress in restoring the railway to service, and he had cleared the Siang River of mines. Major General Chennault's airmen had flown their hearts out, bombing and strafing, but to little avail. The Japanese had at least seven well armed, well clad, well supplied divisions in the field. The Chinese had lost most of their artillery at Changsha. They still had foot soldiers galore...
General George C. Kenney's bombers sank five freighters, left two more burning along with a cruiser. Here & there they picked off singletons. In the South China Sea, one of Major General Claire L. Chennault's Liberators sank a light cruiser. A week earlier the same plane had sunk three merchant ships, total 27,000 tons; before that the 18,765-ton Italian liner Conte Verde, which had just been refloated by the Japs at Shanghai...
That juncture would give China a corridor to India. It would bring in trucks to replace the worn-out jalopies on which China now relies. It would bring a pipeline, with gasoline for Chennault's planes. China's troubles still would not be ended, but they would be very materially lessened...
...Chennault threw all the weight of his Fourteenth Air Force and his Chinese-American Composite Wing into close support of Chinese ground troops which kept the Japs around Hengyang closely invested and even retook two towns near Hengyang which the Japs had grabbed. Chennault's flyers gave the Japs a dose of their own 1941 medicine, by destroying 26 planes at a single field, without loss to themselves...
...this campaign the air force was fighting for its own survival as well as for the ground troops; if the Japs could seize the whole railroad, and mop up eastern China at their leisure, Chennault would lose vital bases in Kiwangsi, Fukien and Chekiang provinces from which his patrols now fan out over Shanghai, Hong Kong and the South China Sea. If these fields are lost, an approach to the China coast by westbound Nimitz-MacArthur forces will be immeasurably more difficult...