(See Cover)
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 Americans felt toward Herbert Hoover in 1933." The U.S. Embassy was evacuating Americans as fast as it could. In the U.S. itself headlines flared the black news. China—and what to do about it—was Page One; Asia's howitzers could now be heard in Kansas City, although the U.S. still had only a very partial notion of how big its stake was in the China war.
Double Miracle? In the vortex of this gathering disaster, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was buoyant and determined. He dodged in & out of his private map room, saw dozens of visitors, counseled his field commanders by long-distance telephone. One day last week he drove through the cold rain to the cavernous National Assembly building, 20 minutes later emerged smiling. He had persuaded liberal Sun Fo, son of China's revered revolutionary leader Sun Yatsen, to become Premier in a new super war cabinet. Asked if the government planned to leave Nanking, Chiang said that no such plan was being considered. He bade Chinese remember the deathbed words of Sun Yatsen: "You shall never yield to the enemy."
Incredibly enough, at week's end, the Gimo's confidence seemed to be working —at least for the moment. The "ten days to three weeks" were up, and the Communists were not yet in Nanking. They had been fought to a standoff in their frontal assault at Suchow and were now shifting for another try, apparently by encirclement, from the south.
The Gimo had done it before. Could he do it again? He sent Madame Chiang off to the U.S. to urge all-out assistance. If the Gimo could hold his country together awhile, and if Madame Chiang could change U.S. policy, it would be a double miracle. If that double miracle did not occur, then an era would have ended.
For China it had been an era of feverish surface progress. "Westernization" had brought plumbing, the beginnings of legislative government and mass education; it had also brought machine guns and Christianity and Karl Marx. Chiang Kai-shek had been a part of all of it; the era's story was his story.