Foreign News: Battle Piece

TIME Correspondent Robert Doyle toured the Suchow battlefield. His report:

The fine loess dust on the rutted dirt road from Suchow to the front, 25 miles to the east, was churned by our jeep into a long brown cloud which hung in the still air. We could hear the distant thump of artillery and the crunch of aerial bombs. Ahead and in some hills to the south, puffs of white billowed where shells and bombs found targets. In a village which had been retaken from the Communists the day before, an old peasant woman squatted at a roadside pond unconcernedly whacking at her laundry with a wooden paddle. Behind her on the mud wall of her burned-out hut the Reds, before they were beaten back, had splashed slogans in white paint: “Fight to Nanking!”, “Land for the Tillers!” and “Capture the liar Chiang alive!”

We were met on the open road by a huge, red-cheeked adjutant who swung down from a truck loaded with heavily armed soldiers. He would escort us to the command post of Lieut. General Li Mi, commander of the Thirteenth Army Group. He pointed north toward a hill rising like the hump of a razorback hog out of the fields. The truck wallowed off the road through a shallow ditch and followed a telephone wire stretched across the parched, lumpy land, already sown with winter wheat.

“No Time for Luxury.” On top of the hill we shook hands with General Li Mi in front of his headquarters—a crude lean-to fashioned out of wooden poles covered with kaoliang stalks. He waved us to a rock ledge in front of the lean-to and said, with a grin, “Come sit with me on my sofa.” General Li apologized for the roughness of his quarters. “Every day I move,” he said. “We have no time for luxury.” Li wore a padded private’s uniform and a private’s winter helmet with the earflaps drawn up.

On order from the general, an orderly brought yellow pears, as large as grapefruit. As we ate, the general traced the Central China battle on the palm of his hand. Twelve miles eastward his old comrade, Lieut. General Huang Po-tao, was encircled in an area 3½ miles in diameter around the rail town of Nienchuang. In eleven days of fighting Huang had lost 40,000 troops. From his position north of the Lunghai railway, General Li was punching east to relieve Huang. In a parallel position south of the railway, Lieut. General Chiu Ching-chuan’s Second Army Group was also pushing east.

On Li’s left flank, to the north, were four Communist columns under Red General Chen Yi. Chiu’s right flank to the south was menaced by another eight columns of Chen’s troops. Ahead, Li and Chiu faced three strong Communist defense lines between them and the beleaguered General Huang. “This is the bitterest fighting I have ever experienced,” said General Li. “I have orders from the Generalissimo to advance at any cost. Communists we have captured say they have been told to fight to the death to hold the line.” In eight days Li had advanced ten miles. He had lost 200 officers, more than 8,000 soldiers.

“Careful, Careful.” As Li talked, a Chinese air force Mustang, humming along in the fading twilight, nosed over and swooped down on a village three mile, east. A few seconds later we heard the sharp chatter of machine guns. “That village is my objective tonight,” said Li. “When the sun is down my artillery will open up and then the infantry will move in.”

When the sun had dropped below the horizon and a white ground mist had crawled slowly up the valley floor along the black line of the Lunghai railroad, Li telephoned an order to his artillery commanders. Within a few minutes two spots in the valley blazed with the flash of cannon fire; tracers from the 37-mm. guns on Li’s tanks cut red streaks through the blackness as they arched in a slow trajectory like monstrous lighted clay pigeons. Less frequently the huge muzzle flash of 105-mm. guns ballooned from the plain, hung for an instant, then blinked out. After an hour, the barrage slowed down. “Now the infantry,” said Li. “Come, we will eat.”

Our jeep trailed behind the general’s as we ground in low gear across the rough ground toward a village headquarters less than three miles from the front. Jeep lights flicked on and off as the drivers tried to avoid the deeper holes. An elliptical orange moon popped over the horizon. As we neared the village we passed an artillery position. The dark forms of tanks loomed up against the sky. A 105-mm. gun directly in front suddenly cut loose, its red flash silhouetting for an instant the crouched figures of the gun crew. A pungent smell of gunpowder rolled over the jeep. General Li leaned out and said quietly, “Careful, careful, we are passing under your muzzle.”

Li’s headquarters were in a mud hut within a mud-walled compound. Outside the door a soldier hunched over a twig fire, drying his cotton shoes. Inside the hut at a table, the commander of Li’s Eighth Army bent over a map. Two candles stuck in their own wax at the corners of the table were the only light. Li waved us to seats around the table and called for food.

“Every Night.” Shortly after we began eating, an orderly called General Li to the phone. He talked for a moment in a low voice and returned to the table. In the candlelight the lines on his youthful face—he is 44 — had sagged. He stared at his rice bowl, then explained quietly that he had just had word of a radio message from his friend General Huang. “The trap is closing,” said Li. “He must have help soon. We must reach him in two days.”

At the meal’s end the general escorted us to our hut, apologizing again for the rough quarters. Through the bright moonlight Chinese air force planes droned continuously overhead, some with bombs which dropped with a heavy concussion, some with supplies to be parachuted to encircled General Huang. Artillery, which was dug in behind the village, kept up an intermittent fire—first came the muzzle blast, then the scream of the shell overhead, then a distant crunch as the shell exploded.

Shortly after midnight, the brittle crackle of small-arms fire welled out of the distance, slowly drew closer. The adjutant roared with laughter at our nervous inquiry. “Pu-yau-chin, pu-yati-chin” (No matter, no matter), he said. “Do not worry. This happens every night. The Communists are counterattacking but we will stop them.”

.At the first light of dawn, soldiers carrying huge bowls of steaming rice cautiously picked their way down the trench-laced narrow streets. A donkey hitched to an ancient wooden-wheeled cart, loaded with shining black 105 mm. shell cases, munched slowly on hay.

Like a Scabrous Disease. Inside the headquarters hut, as Li splashed water on his face from a basin, the adjutant said the general had had a good night. He had been able to sleep from midnight until 3 in the morning. Over breakfast the general explained disconsolately that he had not been able to take his objective. Although a thousand shells had been poured into the village, the Communists had held their line and mustered enough strength to send a counterattack within a mile of the general’s headquarters. “We will take it today,” he said with determination. “We must. We attack at 10 . . .”

After returning to Suchow, we boarded a Chinese air force C46 on a mission to air-drop ammunition and hospital supplies to General Huang Po-tao. Nienchuang, Huang’s headquarters, nestles close to the smashed Lunghai railway. The village has a heart-shaped double wall and a double moat. The southern section of the town was burning and all nearby villages were heaps of wrecked houses.Trenches webbed out from Nienchuang like some scabrous disease infecting the good earth. All around the village, crumpled parachutes from previous drops sprinkled the brown countryside. As the C46 captain dropped to 2,000 feet to release his ammunition, Communist guns in positions within a mile of Nienchuang opened up on the plane but fell short of the mark.

The day after we landed at Nanking came the melancholy news that Huang Po-tao’s moated walls had been pierced. The Communists claimed that his army was segmented and being chewed up piecemeal. If true, this left the Nationalists in a serious position. Both Li and Chiu had seriously overextended their lines in the effort to save Huang, and left themselves wide open to pincer attack. The next move was up to the Communists.