Word: whangpoo
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...times in one day; then the fish all but vanished from the market. By night the incandescent white light of star shells blossomed periodically in the skies around Shanghai. Tracer shells splashed lines of red along the horizon. One shell hit a Standard Vacuum Oil Co. tank near the Whangpoo and 2,000 tons of gasoline went up with a whoosh, burned for 24 hours...
Communist armies exploded into action again along the Shanghai front, which had lain quiet for 15 uneasy days. From the top floor of Broadway Mansions, Shanghai's tallest apartment building, tenants saw sharp flashes of cannon fire across the Whangpoo River, and the glow of burning villages farther to the north. At week's end, Red General Chen Yi's forces, driving relentlessly from the west and southwest, were within eight miles of the city. Simultaneously, two Red armies from the northwest knifed in toward Woosung Fort at the confluence of the Whangpoo and Yangtze rivers...
...artillery could get into position to block the Whangpoo at Woosung, Shanghai would be cut off from the major source of its food, the only source of its coal, fuel oil and raw materials for its factories. Only one question remained: Would the Reds unleash a knockout blow, or would they try to starve the city out? Shanghailanders, lying awake through the long nights, listened to the gunfire and the frenzied barking of frightened dogs in the streets, and waited wearily for the answer...
...retreating troops. In the white-tiled kitchen of the Hotel Cathay the manager argued hopelessly against this intrusion. The soldiers clumped past him in full field equipment, gazed in fascination at the twinkling lights of push-button elevators, and mounted their machine guns in the Tower Room overlooking the Whangpoo River...
When the 2,100-ton ship edged out into the Whangpoo River late in the afternoon, she carried 2,250 paying passengers (mostly loaded earlier at Nanking), plus about 1,200 stowaways with their belongings. The ship's official capacity was 1,186. By 6:30 p.m. her decks were jampacked with blanketed Chinese bedded down for the overnight journey...