Chinese Communist armies had the initiative in Manchuria. Moving down from the north, they cut the railway that connects the Manchurian capital, Changchun, with Government strongholds farther south. Then the Communists advanced toward Changchun itself. Inside the city, spruce, gimlet-eyed General Tu Yu-ming, Government commander for all Northeast China, tried to decide whether the Communists were out to capture Manchuria's capital or only worry it.
Paratrooper General. Youngish (44) General Tu, who sometimes wears a brown stocking cap at headquarters to keep his straight, black hair trained back, had his detractors. Manchurian deputies shouted in Nanking that the Communists were making headway because Tu's officers were busy dealing in opium and loafing in dance halls. But General Tu had shown great ability in beating the Communists to control of southern Manchuria 18 months ago. Now he hoped to keep it from them.
Tu's father was a military scholar who organized militia for Sun Yat-sen and wrote A History of Chinese Tactics and Strategy of the Past Four Thousand Years. Because Tu was an only son, the old historian did not want him to be a soldier. But Tu ran away, entered Whampoa Military Academy, and graduated with the first class, in 1924. A vigorous sportsman in peacetime—he likes to hunt wild asses from horseback in the Gobi—Tu is also an accomplished paratrooper. He got his training from OSS experts training Commando troops in Kunming.
General Tu studied his father's History well. In 1945, he put ancient Chinese tactics to good use to unseat (on the Generalissimo's orders) the old warlord of Yunnan Province, Lung Yun. Tu told Warlord Lung that Nationalist troops would merely be holding maneuvers in Yunnan's capital. Then he surrounded Lung's troops and disarmed them. When Lung was moved to a face-saving position as chief of the National Military Council in Chungking, he demanded punishment for upstart General Tu. The Generalissimo obligingly "banished" Tu to the Northeast China Command to direct the battle for Manchuria.
Suffering from a lame leg last week, Tu could not visit the front as he liked to do. Unhappily, the front was coming to him, anyhow. Nanking was rushing reinforcements to the northern theater by land and air.
Wheel-Shaped City. In Changchun itself—the modern, wheel-shaped city of green trees and creamy buildings which the Japs built as a capital for puppet Manchukuo—the sturdy Manchu citizenry were doing their best to remain calm. During the months of cowboy-&-Indian type warfare around Changchun, civilians could (and many did) pile on to trains heading south toward Peiping. But, with the rails cut, civilians were stuck now.
Many of Changchun's formerly handsome houses were stripped. Russian and Chinese looters, after the Jap surrender, had sometimes taken away even the roofs. The curfew kept citizens indoors from 8 at night to 5 in the morning. Those refusing to be searched by sentries were liable to be shot on the spot. All able-bodied men were subject to call for digging trenches.