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I read recently (The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler - Laurence Rees) he was ordered to trim to create a better seal for the gas mask. Myth?

But then I see the same explanation here...

The Secret of Hitler's Moustache Revealed!
 

TV Soong was the Kuomintang Foreign Affairs Minister and successful financier. He was the brother-in-law of.Chiang Kai-shek
In summer of 1940, Chiang appointed Soong to Washington as his personal representative. His task was to win support for China's war with Japan. Soong successfully negotiated substantial loans for this purpose. Also, while in Washington in 1940, Soong managed to prevail upon President Roosevelt and his administration to back the plan of then-retired U.S. Col. Claire Lee Chennault to firebomb Japanese cities with Boeing B-17 bombers painted with Chinese Air Force markings and flown by American pilots from airbases in China, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A scant month before the Pearl Harbor attack, the plan was scotched by U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall.
 

Jiang Dingwen, a Koumintang Commander facing the 1944 Japanese offensive to eliminate the USAAF B-29 bases in south China, has this revealing observation on the state of the Chinese populace:
"... General Jiang Dingwen of the First War Zone gave his account of the behavior of Henan civilians: "During the campaign, the unexpected phenomenon was that the people of the mountains in western Henan attacked our troops, taking guns, bullets, and explosives, and even high-powered mortars and radio equipment... They surrounded our troops and killed our officers. We heard this pretty often. The heads of the villages and baojia (village mutual-responsibility groups) just ran away. At the same time, they took away our stored grain, leaving their houses and fields empty, which meant that our officers and soldiers had no food for many days."[12] This was revenge for the 1938 Yellow River flood and the Chinese famine of 1942–43.[13] General Jiang's account also said: "Actually this is truly painful for me to say: in the end the damages we suffered from the attacks by the people were more serious than the losses from battles with the enemy."[14] The Henan peasants picked up the weapons Kuomintang troops had abandoned to defend themselves against the Japanese.[15] When the Kuomintang army ordered the Henan locals to destroy the local highways to prevent the Japanese advance, they refused.[16] In fact they sometimes even went back at night and mended roads which the army had torn up by day.[17]
 

Right before Stilwell's departure, The New York Times drama critic-turned-war correspondent Brooks Atkinson interviewed him in Chungking and wrote:
The decision to relieve General Stilwell represents the political triumph of a moribund, anti-democratic regime that is more concerned with maintaining its political supremacy than in driving the Japanese out of China. The Chinese Communists... have good armies that they are claiming to be fighting guerrilla warfare against the Japanese in North China—actually they are covertly or even overtly building themselves up to fight Generalissimo's government forces... The Generalissimo naturally regards these armies as the chief threat to the country and his supremacy... has seen no need to make sincere attempt to arrange at least a truce with them for the duration of the war... No diplomatic genius could have overcome the Generalissimo's basic unwillingness to risk his armies in battle with the Japanese.[98]​
 
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