Posted on 09/09/2008 6:49:27 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
The reoccupation was aid to have been accomplished by a powerful frontal counter-attack in which a heavily reinforced army was combined with sweeping flank attacks from the north and south.
During an afternoon of intense hostilities the Japanese vanguard was said to have been cut off and annihilated by Chinese gunfire, and after subsequent mopping up the Chinese forces re-entered the town. The Chinese state that they killed 1,000 Japanese and captured forty field pieces.
Early today headquarters here has admitted the Japanese capture of Kwangtsi, which was said to have been achieved through the use of gas. It was said that 500 Chinese soldiers perished outright in the gas attack that paved the way for the Japanese success. The type used was not specified.
The Kwangtsi fighting overshadowed all other developments on the war fronts today. The town is considered a vital stronghold of the outer defenses of the Hankow area and its loss would pave the way for a Japanese land attack against the strongest Chinese defenses against an advance up the Yangtze.
North of Kwangtsi the situation at Kushih, where the Japanese yesterday had reached the outskirts of the town, was described here as “obscure.” Its capture by the Japanese was not conceded, although they threatened the town from the northeast, east and southeast.
Six separate Japanese columns were striking at passes in the mountains in the Kushih area.
South of the Yangtze very intense fighting continued east of Mahuiling where the Japanese are attempting to drive southward to Teian. A struggle, costly to both sides, is going on in the strategic hills of this region.
Taking advantage of the bright moonlight, Japanese planes are said to be operating at night as well as by day in keeping-up a twenty-four-hour bombardment of Chinese positions.
The waters of Poyang Lake are reported to be falling rapidly and it is expected that soon the small Japanese gunboats, now able to operate on the lake, will be forced out and this will hinder naval co-operation in the drive on Nanchang.
Sixty per cent of the factories in the Hankow area have been evacuated and established in west Hunan, Szechuan and Shensi during the last few months, government officials estimate.
Aside from the concentration of industries such as steel and textile mills at Chungking, efforts have been made elsewhere to distribute factories in many places and to keep the units so small that they will be mobile in case of a Japanese invasion beyond Hankow. Along with the machinery the workers have also been transferred.
The authorities feel that this transfer of industries from the former economic base around Hankow has been successful to such a degree as seriously to impair the importance of the district to the Japanese if they succeed in capturing the city. At the same time this shift has largely contributed to the creation of Chinese economic power in the far western sections of the country.
The Japanese admit that their losses are 2,300 killed or wounded in the period from Aug. 19 to Sept. 6 in the sectors south of the Yangtze River. A Japanese Army spokesman in Shanghai declared that during the same interval the retreating Chinese abandoned more than 22,000 dead upon the various battlefields.
This spokesman’s statement said that General Chiang Kai-shek had massed fifty-three divisions south of the Yangtze on the fronts at Juichang, the Lushan Mountains, Kiukiang and the Nanchang Railway. Fully half of these had been either destroyed or so shattered by Japanese artillery and aerial bombings and frontal assaults that the organization into divisions no longer functioned, say friends of Japan.
Occasionally Chinese pilots attempted to dispute the Japanese command of the air with a disastrous result, the spokesman said. He instanced last Thursday when six Chinese bombers attempted to raid Japanese troop concentrations in the vicinity of Kiukiang and three were shot down by Japanese pursuit planes.
The struggle on the entire perimeter of Hankow’s distant defense lines has become so grim that every city and town that the Japanese capture is virtually only a mass of smoking ruins with its one-time streets filled with the debris of shattered buildings.
The Japanese spokesmen ungrudgingly express admiration of what they call the valiant and almost hopeless counter-attacks that the Chinese forces have launched in several sectors. They declare that some Chinese units have attacked with such determination and bravery that they were finally almost completely wiped out.
They state that an important new break in the Chinese lines appears to be occurring in the vicinity of Kwangchow, one of the pivotal points in the defenses of southeastern Honan where the Chinese forces are throwing up new lines of trenches six miles east of the city. They are attempting, it is declared, to check the Japanese advance from Kushih, which is said already to have crossed the Chu River. The Japanese front lines are said to be at present nineteen miles west of Kushih along the highway.
This is a page 2 story. I forgot to include the page 2 ads, but I will stick them on the movie review to follow.
The loss of 6m Nationalist Chinese troops, combined with the success of Communist myth-making about their (non-existent) war effort against the Japanese, are two reasons why the Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War after WWII.
1938 China ping.
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