Word: suchow
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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...
...Gimo picked up his military phone and got his Suchow commanders on the wire. His orders: leave the city at once, burn what supplies could not be taken along, seek out the Communist armies to the south and engage them. These were new, last-ditch tactics. It was kill or be killed. Nothing less would save Nanking and Nationalist China from imminent fall...
...Understand." For two days of suspense, the Suchow commanders did not budge. Then the evacuation began. Along both sides of Suchow's main street -a broad expanse of cobblestones bisected by a barren dirt parkway-yellow-uniformed soldiers half enveloped in a thin cloud of dust tramped in an endless stream. At the end of each straggling company marched a soldier with a triangular red or blue pennant; at the rear, donkeys, loaded with heavy machine guns, plodded stiff-legged over the rough street. Trucks piled with bundles and crates swirled by. "So many troops," said a fat, black...
Incredibly enough, at week's end, the Gimo's confidence seemed to be working -at least for the moment. The "ten days to three weeks" were up, and the Communists were not yet in Nanking. They had been fought to a standoff in their frontal assault at Suchow and were now shifting for another try, apparently by encirclement, from the south...
...turned carpetbagger. In one instance, soldiers defending Mukden watched a planeload of payday currency signed over to an army general and flown back to his bank in Shanghai. The government now knew that it did not have to tolerate abuses like that. It showed that it could learn: at Suchow this week, for the first time since the Japanese war, the troops were paid in silver. Morale, eyewitnesses reported, "bounded...