Glasgow Herald 19 JUL 1949
3000 More for Hong Kong
REINFORCEMENTS ARRIVE
FROM DUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
HONG KONG, Monday." More than 3000 officers and men, further reinforcements for the garrison arrived in the Colony to-day on board two troopships, the Empire Trooper and Dunera, bringing their strength to about 10.000 men.
The party include two infhtry bat- talions, the 1st Battalion Argyll and
the Sutherland
and
1st Highlanders
field Battalion Middlesex Regiment, a regiment of the Royal Artillery, and a squadron of Royal Engineers. The Middle- sex giment fought in the defence of Hong Kong in 1941, and several of the men who arrived to-day were captured hére and sent to pson gamps in Japan.
Almost all the reibfordements are being stationed in new teritories where tentéd camps are being hastily prepared for them.
EJ
["The Times and "e Glasgow Herald"
Servic
Communist Offensive
Reuter states from Hong Kong that the Communists, delayed by the widespread floods since the crossed the Yangtze river in the spring, were reported yester- day to have opened their offensive into South China.
the
Military sources in Canton, Nationalist emergency Capital, based their belief on reports of a triple Com- munist drive, on roads and rallways lead- ing deep into the Southern provinces.
Two of these attacks were aimed at Changsha, the rail junction Hunan Province 400 miles north of Carton. The population of Changsha, alarme by two days of Communist attacks to the north and east were flooding out of the city.
Elsewere on the battlefronts thousands of Communists were said to have trossed to the west bank of the Fan River and captured towns and villages in Klangsu Provifice.
On Sunday a Communist army occupied Ichang, at the mouth of the famous Yangtze Gorges.
*
I Canton the Nationalist Cabinet have approved the anti-Communist Pacific unton agreed upon at the recent meet- ing in the Philippines between Generalis- simo Chiang Kai-shek and -President Quirino of the Philippines.
"America to Protest
The United States will protest to the Chinese Communist authorities against the closing of the United States Information Service offices in Shanghai and Hankow, the State Department announced yesterday in Washington.
The Department, confirming for the first time that the offices had been closed, said the protests would be made both to the local authorities in the two cities and to the Communist authorities in Pekin and Nanking.
Mr George V. Allen, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, described the Communist action as
a new
and dramatic proof that Communist dictator- ships, like all other dictatorships, strike out the free flow of information immediately on seizing power.
"Dictatorship and censorship go hand in hand. Totalitarian régimes can exist only by
in their subjects ignorance and by warping their minds with a strictly controlled and one-sided picture."
holding
1817