Word: ichang
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...Central China. It ended in the founding of a republic. Last week, as if timing its action to the anniversary, the Chinese Army announced one of the greatest victories of the Chinese War: Chinese troops had at last hammered their way into the Yangtze River city of Ichang, farthest point of Japanese penetration...
...Japanese had taken Changsha, they had scored their first important victory in China since Ichang fell in June, 1940. Changsha was the focal point of all communications feeding the central front south of the Yangtze. Into Changsha for redistribution poured men and arms from Chungking, gasoline and supplies from the Burma Road, food from neighboring rice country. If Changsha was in Japanese hands, there were dark days ahead for Chiang Kai-shek's Armies to the north and east...
...Ichang neared, the bag of rice was shifted again to a duck-bottomed little junk. Five miles and one river bend above Ichang (the high-water mark of Japanese penetration) the junk ran onto the bank, and the bag of rice was loaded on a coolie's back. The coolie, who carried the rice up a wire-tangled gully toward Divisional H.Q., could hear the boom of artillery. But it was not Chinese artillery...
...crest of the final hill, the coolie could see the entire Ichang Front. All around him were the Chinese strong points: machine-gun posts supported by trenched rifle pits. Farther down were lines of trenches skillfully disguised by green branches, banks of sod, transplanted wheat; odoriferous dugouts in which odoriferous soldiers huddled 24 hours a day; then bamboo and wooden barricades and mine traps; and finally 200 yards of no man's land. Beyond were the Japanese lines-barbed wire, solidly barricaded trenches, concrete emplacements. The whole scene was intimately still-so still that the coolie could hear bees...
...Chen Cheng is also a skillful soldier. The measure of his talent is that the Generalissimo chose him to defend the Gorges -which means defending Chungking, which means defending Chiang. Last summer, when Ichang fell, Chen Cheng was blamed by some for the bad strategy which lost that key city. He then gave up his comfortable job in Chungking as Chief of the Army's Political Training Department and went to the front, publicly vowing not to return until he had retaken Ichang...