Word: hengyang
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...greatest campaign of the year in Asia opened last week amid the yellow stubble of South China's rice paddies, just harvested of their bumper crop. At Hengyang the Japanese had won the battle of Hunan. There they had paused for regrouping, to consolidate their supply lines and to rest their troops. Twice in a month they had feinted, first due south toward Canton, next southwest toward Kweilin, site of a major Fourteenth Air Force base. Both times they had halted, not yet certain they had the preponderant strength needed to finish...
About a thousand miles to the east, in China, the Japs stalled again in their drive down the Hankow-Canton railway from Hengyang and the twin drive toward Kweilin, where the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force base was threatened. The Japs' backing & filling, while increasing their already preponderant power, was puzzling. Of one thing observers were sure: it was now or never for the Japs. Within 60 days the Ledo-Burma supply route should be open. Thereafter, the Japs' last chance to cut China in half and wipe out U.S. A.A.F. bases near the China coast would be lost...
That time the Fourteenth Air Force's big Kweilin base had been stripped and partly scorched. But the panic had died in a crackle of firecrackers when the Chinese Army and the Fourteenth's airmen had checked the enemy at Hengyang. This time the threat to Kweilin was more serious than before...
...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...
Reclaiming Lost Legions. The Chinese high command tried to weaken the Jap blow by staging a diversion far to the north, around Ichang on the Yangtze River. But Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek knew that something more than a diversion was needed. Even as Hengyang was falling, he had put the finishing touches to a plan for Army reform which would doubtless meet opposition from vested military interests, a plan whose terms proclaimed that all was far from well in China's war-worn Army. Its chief points...