Word: hankow
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Japan's plan to capture Hankow, China's acting capital, is first to cut all the city's communications, then gradually encircle it. Last week, a Japanese column tightened the net around the capital by capturing strategic Hwangchwan, north of the Yangtze. Another column captured one of a series of river booms at Wusueh, 100 miles down the river from Hankow. Meanwhile, Japanese aviators bombed away at their main objective, the Canton-Hankow Railway...
Japanese newsorgans, paced by the potent Tokyo Nichi Nichi and Osaka Mainichi, last week made ready to cover the long-awaited fall of Hankow. Some 500 newsmen, photographers and broadcasters, specially equipped with airplane radio transmitters, were poised behind the front to record the triumphal entrance of Japanese troops. Confident Japanese commanders gave out that this would take place before October...
...that, after weeks of excruciatingly slow progress by naval and land forces up the valley of the broad, brown Yangtze, Japanese troops suddenly knifed through stubborn Chinese defense lines and penetrated to Wusueh, on the north bank of the Yangtze, only 80 crow miles from their goal. In Hankow, Chinese military heads, preparing for a last-ditch stand, ordered evacuation of 20,000 women to facilitate defense of the area, and by week's end 1,000 of them were on their way to Chungking, China's inland capital, 500 miles inland from Hankow. Foreign observers last week...
...months the murky floodwaters around the Yellow River, to the north of the Yangtze, have prevented the Japanese from making a widespread onslaught on Hankow but by last week the waters had subsided enough to allow them to set their troops in motion on a 400-mile line, extending from Chengchow on the Yellow River to Teian, 45 miles south of the Yangtze...
Meanwhile, last week, Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, although continuing to evacuate Hankow and evidently believing he cannot defend it much longer, launched a Chinese offensive at the Japanese in boggy, half-flooded, malarial country near Kiukiang, 135 miles down the Yangtze River below Hankow. Even skeptical foreign observers were inclined to take at face value last week the Chinese claim that this desperate counteroffensive threw the Japanese back for heavy losses on the whole width of a 45-mile salient...