Foreign News: Everybody Fight Together

Now that Mukden has fallen (TIME, Nov. 8), Taiyuan has become the prime Communist objective in North China. Taiyuan, surrounded capital of Shansi Province, is the last island of resistance protecting the southern flank of Nationalist General Fu Tso-yi’s North China corridor. For three years Taiyuan’s commander, oldtime warlord Marshal Yen Hsi-shan, has fought off increasingly heavy Communist attacks. Last week TIME Correspondent Robert Doyle flew in to visit the marshal. Doyle cabled:

As we swung in over Shansi’s western border we looked down on an expanse of craggy peaks with terraces stepped up the sides and brown parched river valleys. Taiyuan’s danger could be seen with the naked eye. The walls of the square city hug the slope of a mountain range sprinkled with pillboxes held by the Communists. Marshal Yen’s forces hold a line past the first group of hills to the west, where Taiyuan’s rich coal and iron resources are mined. From positions as close as two miles from the walls the Reds can plunk artillery shells into the city and blanket two good airfields to the south and one to the north. The new airstrip, hastily carved out of dirt road this week, is across the Fen River, three miles west of the city.

Captain Herbert MacWilliams of the Chinese National Aviation Corp., formerly a U.S. Navy search pilot, spiraled the plane down to 200 feet and leveled off to drop our 11,000-lb. cargo of rice. Six soldiers, moving stiffly in heavily padded khaki uniforms, wrestled the 50-lb. rice bags to the open hatch, tumbled them out and watched them land in tiny puffs of dust in a walled compound near the field.

After six passes had emptied the plane, MacWilliams lowered the wheels and circled down for a landing. The heavy plane hit the rutted field in a cloud of dust, bounced a hundred yards, settled again and ground to a stop at the very end of the runway. Twenty minutes later two shells screamed in from the south and tore into the ground across the runway, abeam of the plane.

Camels & Crutches. The flat valley land on both sides of the road into Taiyuan was a forest of pillboxes of every shape and size imaginable to military ingenuity. While soldiers piled bricks to build more pillboxes, brown-skinned Shansi farmers worked unperturbed in patches of cabbage, surprisingly still green. Nestled close to the road itself was a rabbit warren of trenches. The road was clogged with a procession of laden camels, donkey carts, peasants carrying baskets on shoulder poles and others pushing crude barrows.

Inside the city’s 40-ft.-thick walls, civilians clustered at the doors of tight-packed rows of shops. The bandaged heads of soldiers stood out in sharp relief among the crowds. Every few hundred yards our car passed soldiers hobbling on crutches or canes. Most of Taiyuan’s factories are still working—the arsenal, largest below the Great Wall, at full capacity; the cotton mills, machine-tool works, cigarette factories and soda works at reduced output for lack of raw materials. The shops were filled with all kinds of goods—except food.

Marshal Yen Hsi-shan received us in one of the small visiting rooms in his huge compound. The room was stocked with overstuffed chairs and handsomely carved tables bearing cloisonne boxes full of Philip Morris cigarettes. A poster on the wall proclaimed this as the second year of Yen’s five-year plan for the postwar recovery of Shansi. At 65 the marshal is a tired old man suffering from diabetes. His grey-green, unadorned uniform hangs baggily below a long face with sagging jowls and a scraggly grey mustache (his doctors report he has lost 25 pounds since summer). With the weary candor of a man facing the end of years of power, Yen Hsi-shan spoke of his chances for holding out.

Japanese & Fire Bombs. Yen needs food, ammunition and reinforcements. His most serious problem is food. He has only 40 days of food supplies now for his soldiers; he must have an airlift of 5,000 tons monthly to keep going. He has asked Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek for six divisions of troops to bolster his present 120,000; he has been promised three, has received one. In his own arsenal Yen can make heavy machine guns, rifles and bullets; but he needs a monthly airlift of 1,000 tons of artillery ammunition.

The marshal then outlined his own desperate recipe for saving North China: a U.S. volunteer group of 200 pilots and planes, under the command of General Claire Chennault, to be based at Peiping, and a volunteer army of 100,000 Japanese mercenaries (Yen already has 400 Japanese fighting in his hard-pressed northeastern defense sector). U.S. funds would have to support these forces. “Although this is contrary to international policies,” said the marshal slowly, “it is the only hope to stop the Communists.”

“The Nationalist air force,” Yen continued, “is some help, but they bomb from too high and they bomb at random. One American told me that five U.S.-piloted planes with Napalm fire bombs could clean out the Communists around Taiyuan in three days. I believe this to be true.”

Cyanide & Gasoline. The old marshal took us to his study and living quarters, two enormous rooms with walls of Chinese wood scroll work, painted in red, green and gold. The paper-covered panels between the study and bedroom were covered with maxims brushed by Yen himself:

Though I am old, yet my health is good.

Economy among people is most essential.

Everybody fight together against the bandits.

Happiness for a democratic society is endless.

The unhappy marshal sat at a modest desk adorned with a big color photograph of General Chennault and a smaller one of General George C. Marshall. Would he fight to the last? Yen bobbed his close-cropped head and smiled: “Yi-ting, yi-ting” (certainly, certainly). “But if the Communists smash into the city?” The marshal sent an orderly who reappeared with a small cardboard box. He opened the box and displayed 500 tiny vials of potassium cyanide prepared for him by a German doctor. He picked out three. “These are for myself and my family.” The rest were for his staff. Marshal Yen will not only prevent the Communists from capturing him alive—he will not even let them find his body. There are bottles of gasoline stored in his closet, ready to set fire to his room after his suicide.

As we left to catch our plane back to Peiping, the old man still sat at his desk fingering the poison vials. Above his head bas-relief characters in gold on a red background spelled out Yen’s maxim: “I can be patient.”

Back at the airstrip, our escorts fidgeted nervously and kept glancing at the Communist-held hills as darkness settled down. As we winged back through the night, the wind from the open hatch spun the dust on the floor in a whirlpool, picked up a small cardboard tag torn off a shipping crate. The tag told the poignant story of the rapidity of China’s retreat: It said: “To Mukden.”