Word: hankow
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...year before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, the Chinese completed the great Canton-Hankow Railway, linking South and Middle China-1,095 kilometers of arterial steel. To delay the Japanese advance, China's defenders wrecked much of the precious railroad. They dynamited one or two major bridges, collapsed five tunnels by exploding TNT-laden trains inside them, sent 95% of the line's equipment rolling off into the Kweichow gorges, where it still rusts. The Japanese never fully repaired this damage, never ran a train between Canton and Hankow...
Bitter Strength. Last week, TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin cabled from Hankow an account of this dogged engineering miracle...
Most Americans, unfamiliar with Chinese geography, found China's war completely baffling. Its ultimate strategy hinged on control of China's arterial railroads. Like a huge capital A, these trunk lines run from Peiping (at the northern apex of the A) southward to Hankow and Nanking. The bar across the A was the Lunghai Railroad which meandered from Sian, in China's far west, to Laoyao, a minor port on the coast. For Nationalists and Communists alike, control of this A was a strategic necessity. Through its two-way gate Nationalists could move to conquer and hold...
...countryside has been shaved of vegetation by both the natives and hunger-driven refugees on their way to Hankow. .. . The mortality rate, particularly among children, is said to be exceptionally high...
...backwash of postwar epidemics spread across China, carried by 60,000,000 louse-ridden refugees. Two months ahead of the virulent summer season, a cholera epidemic broke in Canton. Only cool weather prevented a full-scale epidemic in Hankow. Bubonic plague broke out in Foochow, and in north China was apparently moving on Peiping and Tientsin. Two planes carrying UNRRA medical supplies flew to Tientsin to meet the threat...