Word: hankow
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Japs had taken stubborn Hengyang, key point on the Hankow-Canton railroad. Now, instead of continuing directly south toward Canton, they flung 120,000 troops southwest along the spur line toward Kweilin. An underprivileged Chinese Army, ill-nourished, ill-armed, ill-clad, stood before them, the Fourteenth's flyers hammered them desperately from above...
...China's war-within-a-war, a great battle had ended in Chinese defeat: after six weeks of siege, heroic Hengyang, on the Hankow-Canton railway, fell to the Japanese. The last word from Hengyang's starving, desperate Chinese garrison went on the radio just a few hours before the end. Said Hengyang's commander: "I am afraid this may be my last message...
Said a furniture dealer: "I am at the end of my resources. Since 1938 the Japs have driven my family and me from Nanking, Hankow and Changsha...
Hengyang Holds Out. About 100,000 Japanese had fought down 100 miles from Changsha past Hengyang, straddling the Hankow-Canton railway on a 50-mile front (see map). In the face of Chinese high command blunders and confusion, the Japanese power reached farther south in this area than ever before. North to meet them from Canton drove another Japanese force. If the two joined, China would be split by a Japanese-garrisoned railway...
...heavy weapons for an army of riflemen and grenade-throwers, had become so vast that a new Burma Road could not satisfy it. Perhaps nothing less than an Allied landing on the China coast and the winning of a major supply port would do. Now the Japs, astride the Hankow-Canton line, threatened to cut this desperate hope. Certainly, until the blockade was thoroughly broken, no one could expect the ill-fed, ill-munitioned Chinese armies to take the offensive...