CHINA: To Defend the Yangtze

The great Nationalist sortie from Suchow had failed. Three army groups set out a fortnight ago to break through the Communist encirclement and link up with government forces to the south (TIME, Dec. 13). By last week one entire group—General Sun Yuan-Hang’s Sixteenth, with 40,000 men—had been completely wiped out. The remaining troops were huddled into an area ten miles in diameter of flat, marshy land 50 miles southwest of Suchow.

The few supplies the Suchow armies had brought with them were quickly exhausted. All last week, through bad weather and Communist flak, commercial and military planes shuttled back & forth from Nanking to airdrop food and ammunition. A returning pilot reported hundreds of Nationalist trucks bogged down along the roads for lack of gas. For the first time in the war he had seen from the air large groups of men actually locked in battle. Every village in sight was burning; the fields were covered with bodies. On his first runs the pilot had had a large rectangle into which to unload his supplies. By the third day the Communists had chewed it into a ragged L. A steady rain of shells poured in from all sides.

To the south, General Huang Wei’s Twelfth Army Group continued to hold out within a five-mile area near Suhsien. Of its original force of 100,000, about 40% had been lost in two weeks. Two armies from the government’s Huai River line pressed northward village by village in an effort to rescue Huang (see below). In five days they had made about 20 miles. At week’s end they still had 20 to go.

“To defend the Yangtze,” an old Chinese proverb runs, “you must defend the Huai.” While Nationalist attention was focused north of the Huai last week, two of Communist General Chen Yi’s agile columns (about 30,000 men) slipped over the muddy stream, struck at the Nationalist rear. At points less than 60 miles from Nanking the raiders tore up several sections of the government’s single-track rail line to the front. Temporarily, at least, all land communications were cut between the capital and its last effective defense force.