attempting to hold the line at Hengyang, at the same time that some of their best troops were following Stilwell on his quixotic journey into Burma. Gauss, who was much less starry-eyed about the CCP than Stilwell and Service were, passed on Service’s enthusiastic accounts faithfully to Washington, but added a rider in which he cautioned against taking the CCP’s assessment of its own contributions too literally. “Recent Chinese Communist claims of military achievements against Japan seem to have been exaggerated,” Gauss cautioned. He acknowledged that the Communists had “unquestionably” set up
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