The emergence of communist China continues...

Even though the Soviets did not recognize the Chinese Communist Party they allowed them to set up their organization in the territory and to begin building up an army there. With the Communists building up in Manchuria, Chiang Kai-shek decided on a bold and decisive campaign to finish them off for good. His two best war-hardened armies, the New First and the New Sixth, which had been fighting the Japanese in South-East Asia, had been re-armed in India by the Americans, including being provided with artillery. Training had been provided in the Ranchi-Hazaribag area by the Americans as well as by the Indian Army of the British. Chiang Kai-shek launched these into Manchuria, where they swept the lightly armed Communists before them, till the Communists made a determined stand at Sipinjie. Fighting practically with their backs to the wall, the Communists fought a month-long pitched battle in May 1946 against the Nationalist fire-power. Gen. Lin Biao threw in wave after wave of attacks, all of which failed. With 40,000 killed, the Communists finally gave up the offensive and fled northwards.

With southern Manchuria recovered, on June 6, 1946, the Nationalist advance elements moving northwards had reached close to Harbin, which Lin Biao was making preparations to abandon. The capture of Harbin would have given the Nationalists all of northern Manchuria However, at this point, the US Army Gen. George C. Marshall, with all the power of a sole ally and financier, trying to broker a peace accord between the two warring Chinese armies, managed to pressurize Chiang to halt his northward advance. It turned what would have been a decisive victory for the Nationalists into a strategic defeat.

The Nationalist advance lost momentum and could never manage to reach Harbin. Three years of bitter fighting (1946-49) in Manchuria followed, after two years of which the Communists captured Mukden (today's Shenyang), the key to the control of Manchuria. The Communist PLA then turned south and in quick succession captured Beijing, Tientsin, Nanking, and Shanghai (1949).

To be continued......