Defend the Graveyard

"Shanghai will be the Communists' graveyard," read posters slapped on store fronts throughout the city last week. "Sacrifice everything to defend Shanghai," exhorted others. But outside the besieged city the Nationalist defense perimeter shrank slowly. From the east, Communist armies moved to within shell range of the city without meeting any real opposition. One night, for the first time in China's civil war, a Communist shell whined into Shanghai's heart.

As Red columns moved into nearby truck-farming areas, fresh vegetables disappeared from the city's open-air markets. Shanghai's fishing fleet lay idle at the docks. The price of yellow fish, one of the city's staple foods, jumped six times in one day; then the fish all but vanished from the market. By night the incandescent white light of star shells blossomed periodically in the skies around Shanghai. Tracer shells splashed lines of red along the horizon. One shell hit a Standard Vacuum Oil Co. tank near the Whangpoo and 2,000 tons of gasoline went up with a whoosh, burned for 24 hours.

In the Park Hotel on Nanking Road, 200 Nationalist soldiers, "heroes of the defense of Shanghai," were wined & dined as the city's guests. On two-day furloughs, they relaxed in bathhouses, had haircuts "on the house," attended Chinese opera at the Heavenly Frog Theater, peepshows at the Great World Amusement Center. They even sat doggedly through Laurence Olivier's cinema Hamlet.

In the south, meanwhile, Nationalist General Pai Chung-hsi continued his withdrawal down the Hankow-Canton railroad, finally set up field headquarters at Henyang, where the railroad branches out to Kweilin in Pai's home province of Kwangsi. To the east, units of one-eyed Red General Liu Po-cheng's armies moved into the towns of Nanping and Shahsien in Fukien province, putting Communist vanguards within 300 miles of the refugee Nationalist capital in Canton. In Canton, Garrison Commander Yeh Shao issued a proclamation declaring the city to be in a state of war, advised citizens who could to return to their native villages. One member of the legislative yuan criticized Yeh. "It is bad to talk like this," he said. "If we think the Communists may take Canton, they'll take all China." '

One morning at week's end, fugitives from Shanghai arrived at Lunghua airport, found the field deserted, a brief message scrawled in chalk across the schedule board. The message read: "Evacuated at midnight." That afternoon, some 750 miles to the south in Hong Kong, an American pilot who had flown one of the last planes out of Shanghai shrugged and said: "Looks like we'll all be going home soon. We're running out of cities to evacuate."

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