Not only were Manchuria’s factories moved out bodily, piled onto freight cars and, in a desultory manner, slowly moved into Siberia, but what the troops were unable to take with them, they maliciously destroyed. Aside from the Kremlin-activated seizure of the factories, the primitive soldiers of the occupying forces, as well as just common bandits, stripped Manchuria’s cities of everything that could, by any remote chance, be useful to them. Both Chinese and Russians followed the age old Mongolian custom and gleefully stole or destroyed all personal property that they could get their hands on. Even fixtures fastened to the walls were pulled out, and door knobs, pipes and plumbing appliances were removed and turned over to the government to be made into ammunition. The Nationalist troops that the Generalissimo had moved in right after V-J Day found it well-nigh impossible to defend Manchurian property. The Chinese Communists used guerrilla warfare almost exclusively against the villagers, their tactics being to terrorize, kill and destroy before help could come from the Nationalist troops. “Sack and pillage” kept the people in constant panic. In an endeavor to isolate and defeat the Nationalists, the Communists tore up all the railroads. Peasants were conscripted to dig up hundreds of miles of railway track. They burned the ties, levelled the roadbeds, hid or carried away the rails, and demolished the drainage structures. Practically all the bridges were destroyed by explosives, all signal towers and sidetrack mechanisms were wrecked, and every other wanton damage that fiendish ingenuity could conceive or devise was inflicted. As a final gesture of brutality, captured locomotive engineers who were known to have Nationalist sympathies had their hands cut off. This kind of fighting completely destroyed the economy of Manchuria. From being a food and industrial surplus area, she became poverty-stricken. The people, living in barren houses without furniture or utensils of any kind, were reduced to the level of their primitive ancestors. Water became the scarcest of commodities and, with the reservoirs destroyed, had to be brought up from the dirty rivers in buckets. City transportation was at a premium. It ranged from the luxury of a pedicab, to ancient carriage bodies or automobile chassis, hauled by men, tiny ponies and dogs. A few families found a new use for the bathtub which they had been able to salvage. Mounted on rickety wheels, it was used as a public conveyance, and men, women and children sat huddled together in it. Sometimes a huge umbrella, Chinese or foreign, protected them from a scorching sun or a driving rain. It made a grotesque picture indeed!