Word: mukden
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Each month, from beleaguered Changchun and Mukden, 140,000 people press through the opposing military lines and cruel no man's land toward Tientsin, Peiping and the hope of a living. The distance they cover is upwards of 800 miles. The ordeal they undergo, as culled from my own observation in Manchuria and North China and from the press in Nanking, would need a Tu Fu to compass...
...travelers hit the Nationalist lines again at Kaiyuan on the Mukden perimeter. They have been on the road five or six days. They have slept in their rags, sometimes on boards in wayside inns, more often on unsheltered ground, blessing themselves that it is not the icy Manchurian winter. They have eaten the food they brought along-mostly wheaten cakes...
Within the Mukden siege ring the refugees are registered again, inspected again. Since horsecarts are not allowed beyond Kaiyuan, they must be sold for whatever price the racketeering army men may offer. Communist currency is confiscated. The wheaten cakes are broken by inspectors looking for concealed opium. Then the authorities hustle the travelers on to rugged refugee trains-a sort of slow-moving human cattle car jampacked with unwashed, heartsick bodies...
Because of the lost supplies, Mukden's 2,500,000 civilians faced slow death by hunger and disease. Cabled TIME Correspondent Frederick Gruin after a look at the city: "You see the marks of the struggle in the taut, unsmiling faces on the streets. You see it in the meagerly equipped hospitals where acute tuberculosis has doubled. Rickets, twilight blindness, beriberi and other vitamin-deficiency diseases have become common...
Despairing Message. Everybody who could was leaving beleaguered Mukden. The lucky few went by plane, the majority (140,000 last month) by train, which ran only as far as Hsinmin on the edge of the Mukden defense perimeter. Said a ragged shopkeeper, crouched in the station with his family of ten: "We will go to Tientsin where my ancestors lived. We'll become farmers again." The Chinese Reds would gladly let him through. The message of despair that he and other refugees would bring to Nationalist China was payment enough...