CHINA: Last Salvo

Slowly but inexorably, the armies of Communist General Chen Yi bore down across the flatlands of the Yangtze delta. In the second week of the South China offensive the Reds’ pace had slowed down somewhat, but they triumphantly reported eight Nationalist armies crushed and trapped between the Yangtze and the coast. Hangchow, last coastal railroad gateway to the south, was deserted and lay open to the conquerors. Red armies also bore down on Shanghai.

Shanghai’s Garrison Commander Chen Ta-ching spoke bravely of making Shanghai “a second Stalingrad.” Quietly and unannounced, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek had briefly visited Shanghai, defiantly proclaimed his hope of “final victory” in three years. A long-gowned shopkeeper, standing in his deserted tobacco shop, read the Gimo’s words, said sadly: “Mo-liao yi pao [his last salvo].”

Shanghai was a city of refugees. Along the Bund and Nanking Road, the best hotels were being taken over by weary 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.

At the fashionable Palace Hotel, old China hands still danced under the whirling colored lights of the cocktail lounge. Three Nationalist soldiers, in rough padded uniforms, left silently when the headwaiter told them the price for tea.

Black-uniformed security police tried vainly to sift out Communist fifth columnists from among Shanghai’s millions. As thousands of refugees streamed in, thousands of others fled.

The scene seemed symbolic of Western man’s hasty and confused exodus from China. But not all Westerners left. Many decided to stick it out with their Chinese friends. Said the wife of a U.S. businessman who stayed: “I feel like a cross between Florence Nightingale and a damn fool, but I’m staying.”