Word: lunghai
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...crucial battle of the war was still being fought, however, around Suchow, the junction city of the Tientsin-Pukow and the Lunghai Railways in Central China. In that vicinity the Japanese Army, doubled to a strength of 200,000 men in the last two weeks, was getting perilously near to the vital railway, had almost encircled Suchow. While Chinese defenses North of the railway held fast, even Chinese communiqués admitted Japanese advances by mobile columns from the South. At week's end the Japanese claimed that one column had cut the railroad at Tangshan, 50 miles west...
...Japanese claimed that the successful closing of the Lunghai corridor's western end would mean that an army of at least 400,000 of Chiang Kai-shek's best soldiers would be bottled up in a narrowing pocket around Suchow, with little chance of escape, with only the alternatives of surrender or annihilation. Since this corridor is at least 100 miles long and never narrower than 45 miles, the Japanese claim was considered optimistic. The effective closing of the long western end of the Lunghai corridor seemed to military experts to be feasible only if Japan sent many...
...main battle of the war last week was still being fought northeast of Suchow, from 15 to 50 miles north of the eastern end of the Lunghai Railway. Into an area more than half the size of Long Island, General Li Tsung-jen, commander-in-chief of the Fifth War Area, had poured about 650,000 Chinese soldiers for what six months ago would have been a real anomaly-a Chinese offensive. Opposing them were 100,000 well-trained, well-armed Japanese troops...
Striking quickly from the eastern side of the Lunghai Corridor, the mobile Chinese captured for a night the walled town of Tancheng, almost 15 miles back of the farthest advanced Japanese line. With their forces at Nanlakow thus threatened, reinforced Japanese troops retook the town, but realized that the wily Chinese by this stroke had succeeded in lengthening what was already for them a too extended southern Shantung battlefront...
...Japanese aim is to clear the Tient-sin-Pukow Railway so the Japanese puppets of Peiping can be united with the equally submissive Nanking puppets. At one point north of Suchow the Japanese advance guard was stalled 15 miles from the Lunghai Railway. At another point south of Suchow a Japanese column was reported within 20 miles of the line. The southern force was small, however. Between it and the main southern army were scores of miles of hostile territory. A gap of at least a hundred miles had to be filled before the two puppet governments could meet...