What happens
Major Chen leads a column of Chinese Communist soldiers on a night march through rain and mud behind the Japanese lines, moving quietly toward a Japanese garrison. Before dawn they reach the garrison and set up their machine guns around it. The story then turns to the Chinese Communist movement itself, tracing how its supporters organized an army and government in North China, and how their dispute with the Nationalist government over democracy and the course of the war developed. The Pacific Story was a public service series broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company, and this episode carries commentary by traveler and author Agnes Smedley. It first aired on July 23, 1944.
Behind Japanese lines in North China, with flashbacks to Shanghai in the 1920s, the Long March, and Communist-held territory in the northwest during the war with Japan.
Characters: Major Chen, Sergeant, Ming, Sue Wing, Mao Tse-tung, Sun Yat-sen
Listen for: The whispered orders along the column during the night march, and Agnes Smedley's commentary on the Communists' democratic government and their dispute with the Nationalists.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.