CHINA: Heavy Blow

One day early last week, the Gimo pondered a war map in his upstairs study. It was time for the kind of decision he has seldom made.

The 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.

The 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.

“I Do Not 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-gowned merchant, standing in front of his shop; “suddenly they are marching. Where?” He shook his head. “Wo pu-tung, wo pu-tung (I do not understand, I do not understand).”

Commander-in-Chief Liu Shih flew down to the grey-walled rail town of Pengpu on the Huai’s south bank, to set up a new operational base. Deputy Commander Tu Yu-ming led the march overland with three “army groups” (about 110,000 combat troops), commanded by Generals Li Mi, Chiu Ching-chuan and Sun Yuan-liang. The leader of a fourth army group, General Huang Po-tao, was left a suicide on the field where his 90,000 men had been encircled and cut to pieces. Behind the withdrawing Nationalists, over Suchow’s blasted ammunition dumps and supply depots, 8,000-foot pillars of black smoke drifted in the still, frosty air. For once, the Reds were not going to capture Nationalist supplies.

Ropes for Passengers. If the Suchow forces were able to link up with the encircled Twelfth Nationalist Army Group at Suhsien, 50 miles to the south, they would be a serious threat to the rear of Communist General Chen Yi, commanding the Huai River attack. Chen Yi made a quick about-face. Leaving a small holding force behind on the Huai, he sent six columns (some 125,000 men) to cope with the threat from the north.

One hundred miles southeast of the Huai, Nanking was abuzz with rumors. Travelers reported trainload after trainload of Nationalist troops, ammunition and supplies moving back from the Huai to Nanking. The government’s 20th Army, stationed in Hankow, to the west, was being moved not to the Huai—but to Nanking. The Chinese government began shipping out dependents of government officials southward to Canton and Formosa.

Those who could followed the government’s lead. Nanking’s exits were choked day & night by streams of carts and automobiles heading for open country. Chinese riverboat captains no longer even dared let down their gangplanks at Nanking. From a safe distance offshore, they threw ropes to as many passengers as they could haul aboard. After the sinking of the overloaded SS Kiangya (see below), the military finally stepped in and took over all transportation facilities.