Word: honan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...make these gains, Japan used a small force-probably no more than 50,000 men. But fleets of trucks, mobile cannon, some 600 whippet tanks and armored cars gave this army its winning asset: mobility on the vast Honan plain (in three weeks the Japanese covered some 300 miles...
...hungry General Shunroku Hata had used this and other assets, like superior firepower, with seeming skill and a full appreciation of the weakness of his foe. He split his forces into small columns (the two which crossed the Yellow River numbered only 5,000 men), sent them streaking across Honan's ripening wheat fields. Once his wedges had pierced the outer defense belts, he sent them into mushroom patterns. Result: encirclement of Chinese front-line troops. The advance went...
...vast plain , of Honan, gaunt Chinese farmers watched the enemy tanks crush their fat grain, watched the enemy horsemen feed their mounts on ripe wheat...
...first nine days, the Japanese Army shot out a dozen tentacles to the west and south, captured 1,800 sq.mi. of wheat-blanketed Honan flatland, took the town of Chengchow (prewar pop. 700,000), seized the historic Hulap pass to the west. Now the Chinese looked unhappily to the summer, when a Japanese-held rebuilt railway from Chengchow southward may well be used to feed a new offensive in central China...
...Honan's people, emaciated after two years of famine, the enemy push held but one promise: another hungry year...