Hello - I came across this link and story - and it seems a bit unbelievable (there are many unbelievable things to have happened in war though) and was wondering if it was true? It seems like if it was fictional though, it would be a rather odd piece of Japanese propaganda...

Time Magazine,November 29 1937: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 53,00.html

Chinese leaders have been talking for weeks about how their troops would be able to hold "for six months" against Japanese onslaughts "the Chinese Hindenburg Line," Fushan-Soochow-Kashing. Its thousands of cement pillbox forts built upon hummocks in swampy terrain appeared most formidable, and bulwark of this Hindenburg Line was Soochow...

..One day last week Japanese dropped some 700 bombs upon Soochow and not long afterward the official Japanese military spokesman at Shanghai gave out the following details, which Chinese officials did not deny: "About midnight, from our front lines two scouting parties totaling seven or eight men each began a careful reconnoiter toward Soochow. They stealthily followed two large bodies of Chinese troops retreating toward the city. The Soochow gates stood wide open and the Chinese forces marched in and stacked their bayoneted rifles, whereupon fifteen Japanese followed.

"The Japanese proceeded to the city administration building and, when dawn broke, hoisted the Japanese flag, creating an extraordinary panic among the Chinese forces within the walls, all of whom fled by every available gate, some with and some without arms, and all without firing a shot. Those fifteen scouts, without a single man killed or wounded, remained in undisputed possession of Soochow for the next three hours, until other Japanese forces overtook them."

Concluded the Japanese spokesman: "We consider the capture of the great city of Soochow in these circumstances to be the most unusual, tragi-comic exploit in the history of modern warfare."...

"See you in Sinkiang!" With his Hindenburg Line cracked, and with Japanese launching 200 armed flat boats on Lake Tai to shoot up and disorganize lakeside villages, Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek faced at his capital Nanking last week the virtual certainty that Japanese armies would soon sweep around south of Lake Tai, descend on him even if he could keep them from also sweeping around north of the lake and up the Yangtze River. Some 70 Japanese river gunboats were already pounding away at the Chinese boom of sunken junks which was flung across the Yangtze to block it weeks ago and defended by the Kianyin forts. The second line of Chinese defense ran last week from these forts to Wusih. Much of the Hindenburg Line had not yet given way when Generalissimo Chiang abruptly decided that his Government must evacuate Nanking, disperse itself all over the map of China...