Word: honan
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...scene was Honan, a province about the size of Missouri, but inhabited by 32 million peasants who grew wheat, corn, millet, soybeans, and cotton. Honan was a fine flat plain whose soil was a powdered, yellow loess which, when wet with rain, oozed with fertility. And which, when the rains did not come, grew nothing; then the peasants died. The rains had not come in 1942, and by 1943, Honan peasants, we heard in Chungking, were dying...
What a famine was, I did not know-nor did I know that the Honan famine of 1943 was one of the worst in modern history. But it sounded as if it would make a story. So, at the end of February 1943, I flew to North China with my friend Harrison Forman of the London Times, and won permission to travel the Lunghai railway from Paochi through Sian to the gap through which the Yellow River flowed and the railway ran. The Japanese, on the far side of the river, habitually shelled this gap by day. The station...
...glazed with the sight when I arrived in Loyang, the provincial, capital of Honan; and there at the station, in the dark, they were packing refugees into boxcars like lumber for the night run over the gap. And again, the stink of urine and bodies; then, through the deserted streets to the Catholic mission...
...impatient had I been to get the story out from the famine area that I had filed it raw from Honan, from the first telegraph station en route home-Loyang. By regulation, it should have been sent back via Chungking to be censored and almost certainly stopped. This telegram, however, was flashed from Loyang to New York via the commercial radio system in Chengtu, direct and uncensored. Thus, when the story broke, it broke in TIME magazine-the magazine most committed to the Chinese cause in all America. Madame Chiang K'ai-shek was then...
Heads I know, did roll, starting, I assume, with those at the hapless telegraph office of Loyang, which had let slip to America the embarrassment of death in Honan. But lives were saved -and saved by the power of the American press...