CHINA: You Shall Never Yield...

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The Communists were overrunning China like lava. Mukden and all Manchuria were gone—and 60% of China's best troops had gone with them. In the great rust-red plain between Nanking and Suchow, the last government armies in Central China confronted an enemy that had beaten them before. U.S. military experts had given Nanking "ten days to three weeks."

In the big cities, the prestige of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had sunk lower than the Yangtze. An American traveler in Shanghai wrote home: "His name is mud in all classes—they feel toward him as...