Victory & Peril

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's armies swept through strategic, Communist-infested Shantung province and captured the vital port of Chefoo. Three days later, the old British base of Weihaiwei fell. With Shantung, the Communists would lose their last major stronghold south of the Great Wall, and their No. 1 manpower reservoir (Shantung, with 39 million people, is China's second most populous province). The Communists would also lose the mountainous flank from which they had harried the Government's main north-south lifeline, the Tientsin-Pukow railway. Chefoo's capture was the greatest Government victory since, the capture of Yenan, the Communist capital.

But while the Nationalists swept Shantung, disaster threatened in the north. The Communists opened a smashing offensive to crush the Government corridor along the north-south railroad in Communist-occupied Manchuria. They captured the important railway center of Kungchuling, moved in on Szepingkai and claimed control of almost two-thirds of the vital Mukden-Changchun railroad. Changchun, Manchuria's capital at the corridor's northern end, and Mukden, at its southern end, were cut off. (As Mukden was placed under martial law, frantic civilians paid fabulous prices for seats on airplanes which alone linked the city with the rest of China. One 28-passenger plane carried 108 people.) China's ill-equipped First Army was now forced to make a desperate stand at the end of a broken supply line and against numerically superior forces. The Communist army in Manchuria is estimated at 300,000 men. The Chinese military intelligence reported last week that the Russians had moved an additional 25,000 Red-trained Korean troops to Manchuria.

So grave was the situation and so vital is Manchuria to China that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek flew to Peiping to direct defense operations.

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