Word: kwangsi
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Units the Chinese Army had marshaled for the defense of Kwangsi Province and its capital, Kweilin, had all kinds and grades of equipment: U.S. artillery, Russian tanks, Jap or Chinese guns. Some had fired away the last shell before the climax of the campaign came. Some were exhausted, others untried. In one corner of the Jap flank General Hsueh Yueh had 4,000 men-but only 2,000 serviceable rifles. Other units lacked boards to construct shelters, lacked signal flags for communicating with American airplanes, lacked radios to link their own flanks to their own headquarters...
...that opposed them-the Chinese, with no ammunition left, had to get away as best they could. The Japs overran Lingling, a Fourteenth Air Force field. At that rate of advance, ten days more would put them in Kweilin, site of a major U.S. air base and capital of Kwangsi Province...
Bottleneck. One natural defense remained. A scant 15 miles south of the Kwangsi border, before which the Japs were poised, is the Hwangshaho defile, where river, railroad and highway all pass through a gap five miles wide and eight miles long. Here, if anywhere, a stand must be made. But it must be made with lesh against machines. Cabled TIME'S Correspondent Teddy White: "Kwangsi's one resource, its one hope of resistance, now lies in marshaling a people's army such as helped to stop the Japanese in their first penetration of this province four years...
...Japs were bound not only for Kweilin, capital of Kwangsi Province, but also for Chenankwan on the French Indo-China border. If they ever got there, East China, with its bases from which Chennault's hard-driven aviators harass the enemy from Shanghai to Formosa to Hainan, would be lost. From such a catastrophe, the Pacific commands of General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz would suffer almost as much as the Chinese...
Kweilin, the "Paris of China," was close to panic again. Panic had struck first seven weeks ago when the Japanese, poised in Hengyang, had seemed headed for the battered but glamorous Kwangsi city (pop. 100,000), whose holiday habits and friendly girls have made Kweilin's name blessed among U.S. airforcemen on pass...