Word: mudding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...great, bloody battle around Suchow had produced a familiar pattern. Fast-moving Communist columns had swirled about the city, wiped out upwards of a quarter of its Nationalist garrison in bitter fighting, then bypassed and isolated the remainder. Now the Communists were striking 100 miles farther south, toward the mud-laden Huai River, last organized defense line before Nanking. Suchow might become another Tsinan or Mukden. If the Nationalists followed their former tactics, they would sit there waiting for death...
...cities, the prestige of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had sunk lower than the Yangtze. An American traveler in Shanghai wrote home: "His name is mud in all classes-they feel toward him as Americans felt toward Herbert Hoover in 1933." The U.S. Embassy was evacuating Americans as fast as it could. In the U.S. itself headlines flared the black news. China-and what to do about it-was Page One; Asia's howitzers could now be heard in Kansas City, although the U.S. still had only a very partial notion of how big its stake was in the China...
...less like a union big shot than a man taking a rest cure at some stodgy, back-country hot springs. He made no speeches at all; when he sat down to listen to convention oratory, he did so with the resigned air of a man lowering himself into a mud bath for the good of his soul and his sweat glands...
...hills to the south, puffs of white billowed where shells and bombs found targets. In a village which had been retaken from the Communists the day before, an old peasant woman squatted at a roadside pond unconcernedly whacking at her laundry with a wooden paddle. Behind her on the mud wall of her burned-out hut the Reds, before they were beaten back, had splashed slogans in white paint: "Fight to Nanking!", "Land for the Tillers!" and "Capture the liar Chiang alive...
...headquarters were in a mud hut within a mud-walled compound. Outside the door a soldier hunched over a twig fire, drying his cotton shoes. Inside the hut at a table, the commander of Li's Eighth Army bent over a map. Two candles stuck in their own wax at the corners of the table were the only light. Li waved us to seats around the table and called for food...