Word: whangpoo
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Shanghai Campaign. To the mouth of the Yangtze steamed Japanese troopships with 55,000 aboard. Some 13,000 landed at various points near Woosung at the junction of the Whangpoo and Yangtze north of Shanghai; the rest, 42,000, stayed aboard waiting for an all-clear signal, while Japanese men-of-war made demonstrations along the shore. When the Japanese made their main landing in force, the first 700 men ashore, led by 70 picked troops who formed a shirodasukitai ("White Band of Death"), swept the first Chinese aside, pushed on towards what they thought was the second defense line...
Supercilious Mandarins set aside for the foreign devils of Shanghai a separate area, eventually enlarged to a long strip of mud flats and pestilential swamps on the elbow bend of the Whangpoo River. Here separate concessions were established by Britain, the U. S., France. The French Concession has remained a separate entity, the other two combined in an International Settlement governed by a mixed commission to which other nations, including Japan, were later admitted...
...corner of the famous Bund which skirts the Whangpoo, and Nanking Road, heart of the section where Americans congregate, the sky fell fortnight ago when a Chinese air bomb intended for the Idumo fell, plunk!, into the Palace Hotel (No. 10 on the map). Another, a mile away, snuffed out 500 lives when it plunked into the Great World Amusement Palace, crammed with gibbering Chinese...
...extension of the International Settlement, until the Japanese warships opened fire to support their forces on land. Across the river on the right bank other Japanese troops tried to push back Chinese defending forces. Down from the Bund through this crossfire Americans were ferried to the mouth of the Whangpoo where ships picked them up to carry them to sea and safety. Meantime Admiral Harry Ervin Yarnell placed the U. S. S. Augusta (see map) so as to give maximum protection to the western half of the International Settlement where the remaining Americans and British were seeking safety...
Line Broken. A crisis for the Japanese occurred two days later when Chinese soldiers plunging in wave after wave against the street barricades of Japanese marines, broke through the line to the north river bank held for many hours about five full blocks of Whangpoo dockyards. Promptly the Japanese warships in midstream upped anchor and steamed slowly past the broken line Too close to depress the muzzles of their big guns sufficiently, they passed in review pouring a hot stream of fire from every machine gun and light cannon into the Chinese lines...