Taierhchwang
Language: English
Part of speech: name
Senses: examples: text: General Sun commanded the Second Army Group, which was so successful at Taierhchwang. General Tang conducted the defense of Nankou Pass, and ably supported General Sun on the right at Taierhchwang.
ref: 1940, Evans Fordyce Carlson, The Chinese Army: its Organization and Military Efficiency, New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, →OCLC, page 29:
text: These five defects—piecemeal reinforcements, dispersion of his main forces, lack of strategic coordination, missing of opportunities, and frequent encirclements but little annihilation—characterised the incompetence of the Japanese command before the Taierhchwang campaign.
ref: 1954, Mao Tse-tung, “Possibilities of Exploiting the Enemy's Flaws”, in On the Protracted War, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, page 123:
text: At six o'clock on the morning of April 7, an officer, bursting with excitement, awakened the whole group to announce that during the night the Chinese had driven the Japanese out of Taierhchwang. Not only was it the first major Chinese victory of the war, it was also the first time in history that a Japanese army had suffered a frontal defeat.
Until eleven o'clock that morning the film team waited frantically for transportation to Taierhchwang—but the Chinese weren't going to let them get near the town until it was certain that no pockets of snipers remained and that there was no immediate danger of a Japanese attempt to retake the town. When the group finally arrived in Taierhchwang, they found a scene of overwhelming desolation: buildings reduced to piles of rubble, streets strewn with bodies, trees stripped of their branches—and even of their bark—by machine-gun and artillery fire. But on the ramparts were Chinese soldiers proudly waving the Nationalist flag.
Life laid out Capa's pictures of troop maneuvers in and around Taierhchwang in such a way as to suggest that he had gone to the front with the 31st Division at dusk on April 6 and had remained with them throughout the night of battle. Even more misleading was the accompanying text, which claimed that Taierhchwang's name would be added to the list of "small towns famous as turning points in history—Waterloo, Gettysburg, Verdun." The victory at Taierhchwang turned out to be more valuable for propaganda than for any lasting strategic importance; the Japanese soon retook the town, and Suchow fell to them at the end of May.
The victory at Taierhchwang did much to raise Chinese morale, but when Capa returned to Hankow on Easter Sunday, April 17, his own morale was very low.
ref: 1985, Richard Whelan, Robert Capa, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 137:
text: Although Peter Koester told him that the pictures he'd been able to send back to New York—including shots of a Chinese victory at the walled town of Taierhchwang, unprecedented coverage of one of Chiang Kai-shek's cabinet meetings, and a series showing peasants fleeing the defensive flooding of the Yellow River—were "first class . . . technically, reportagewise, better than your Spanish work," Capa was having a difficult time of it.
ref: 2014, Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, →OCLC, pages 319–320:
glosses: Alternative form of Tai'erzhuang.