Word: mukden
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...heart of the book is Rowan's coverage of the 1948 siege of Mukden, or Shenyang, the linchpin in the Communist conquest of Manchuria. Rowan and Birns are on hand as the city falls and, after a hairy escape off a bombarded air-strip, learn that the Nationalists are refusing to report the defeat. Rowan can cable his scoop back in time for the week's edition, but Birns' photographs can only travel by air. The two secure passage for the film on a 40-hour flight to San Francisco. LIFE holds the presses for 12 hours and sets...
...Sept. 18, 1931, a Japanese army lieutenant meticulously wired 42 cubes of yellow blasting powder and buried the load in the earth 5 ft. from railroad tracks north of the Manchurian city of Mukden (now Shenyang). The explosives would throw a lot of dirt but cause little damage to the rail line. After all, the South Manchurian Railroad was Japanese-owned and linked the empire's economic outposts in predominantly Chinese Manchuria. All the army wanted was an "incident...
...local warlord, an ally of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had kept his soldiers in their barracks to avoid clashes. At 11:30 p.m., Japan's Manchuria-based Kwantung army began attacking Chinese positions. By dawn they were joined by planes from the imperial colony of Korea. Quickly, Mukden was effectively under the empire's control. In the following months, the resource-rich region, more than thrice the size of prewar Poland, would be annexed. As for the railway, a train passing over the tracks 20 min. after the blast reported only a slight bump...
Actually, the Mukden Incident of 1931 was not the first time Japan's Kwantung army had tried to seize Manchuria. In 1928 the army assassinated the Chinese warlord who ruled the region in hopes of grabbing the territory outright. But the Japanese government squashed any further moves and hushed up the army's involvement in the killing. In 1931, Tokyo again tried to stop the army. But renegade officers arranged for a geisha to distract and delay the envoy sent by the central government. Overtaken by events and well aware that the Manchurian offensive had won acclaim for the militarist...
...righteousness. Political analysts harp on two words: "speed" and "struggle." Mao had acquired the lust for speed in the last year of the revolution. In the fall of 1948 the commander in chief of his Manchurian strike forces, Marshal Lin Biao, had seized the key city of Shenyang (Mukden); but so many of Chiang Kai-shek's combat divisions were still at large in Manchuria that Lin Biao preferred to move with caution. Mao overruled him. Strike for the escape ports of Manchuria, he said, now. Cut them off. Field success vindicated him. Cut Peking off from Tianjin, Mao next...