Ron took the letter from his father and read it.

"Father, I've been in Shandong for almost a year, and the situation has changed very quickly in the past year. I can already clearly feel the dawn of victory in the war......

…… I remember when I first arrived in Shandong last year, when the situation was still tense, and Rì himself built a large number of turrets all over the province - a kind of tall brick or concrete blockhouse. In fact, due to the lack of cement, most of the so-called turrets are made of brick and wood. This kind of thing is generally two or three stories high, and the strength of the brick and wood structure is also very limited, if this thing is in Europe, it is simply asking for its own death. All it takes is a small 37mm gun, or even a .50 caliber M2 machine gun, to the ground. However, we don't have any of these things.

The weapons that the guerrillas had were very rudimentary, my team was the so-called 'main force', but the largest artillery we had was only 75 mm mountain guns captured from the rì army, and these guns were not only very few in number, but also very few shells, not even 10 shells per gun, and there was almost no possibility of replenishment. This made it impossible for our fighters to conduct artillery training at all in peacetime. And when it came time to fight, in order to ensure that precious shells were not wasted when striking, our fighters, against enemy fire, had to push those cannons to an exaggerated distance, less than a hundred meters, perhaps only fifty meters—I dare say any closer, and Rì himself would be able to throw grenades into our running positions. Sometimes we fired a cannon and the debris could hit our gunners. In this way, we ensured that our artillery would be 100 shots, and of course, this also made the gunner the most dangerous profession, and if I opened an insurance company, I would never sell insurance to the artillery of the Eighth Route Army. Of course, we rarely have the luxury of hitting pillboxes with shells, and more often than not, relying entirely on manpower, we break through the blockade of enemy machine-gun fire and use a bag full of explosives to blast the enemy's turrets.

Even such explosives packages are hard-won. I know a college student from Běijīng who was in charge of making TNT by hand with some people, and just a month before I write this letter, he lost a hand in an accidental explosion. It was an unfortunate thing, but just three days later, I saw him bandaged up again and happily back to work. He said to me, 'Only one hand?' This is not a problem, because to play a small rìben, one hand is enough! They call this attitude 'revolutionary optimism'. To be honest, life in Shandong is hard and dangerous, and one of the reasons that can attract me to continue to persist here is probably because there is such a group of noble and pure good people here.

Rì himself dug a lot of trenches on both sides of the road, built turrets every other distance, and during the day, we could barely do anything, and even at night, it was dangerous to cross the barriers, at least for the last year. But by the second half of last year, things were starting to change.

In skirmishes, our troops continued to attack small groups of the enemy. The people are on our side, and if the devils make any move, we can almost always get accurate information, which makes us always able to concentrate our superior forces to ambush those small groups of devils, and when those devils go out on a large scale and want to come to find a place, they will find that they can't find anything, whether it is us or the common people. Most of the time, they can only set fire to people's houses to vent their anger. And this also makes the people hate them even more......

The situation of insufficient troops is getting more and more serious, and every time they want to concentrate their forces on a large scale to play some kind of sweep, there will be a power vacuum in more areas, and we will drill out of the cracks of the enemy's army, drill into the enemy's controlled area where the enemy's strength has been drained, destroy the enemy's organs, and destroy the small forces left behind by the enemy. As a result, the Devils found that every time they launched a 'big sweep', the area under our control expanded a little. As a result, the later it gets, the more the devils dare not come to do any 'sweeping'. In the words of my Chinese friend, the devil is about to drown in the sea of the people's war.

In addition, thanks to the hard work of our great American ** team -- and perhaps I should pay tribute to our little Ron here -- the devils of this year, even though they were already under-armed, had to constantly draw out experienced veterans and send them to the Pacific to die. So by the end of the year, the level of the devils who fought against us was getting worse and worse, and we were able to keep catching more and more prisoners. Many of these captives were half-grown children in their teens, who were supposed to be in middle school.

By this year, Rì himself was no longer able to carry out a 'sweep' from time to time as he used to, and he could not even maintain the existing area. They had to retreat from many strongholds, retreating into places such as the county seat and a limited number of support points, and the outside of the county town and those support points became completely our world. By the second half of this year, Rì himself was in fact surrounded by us.

This also means that we have cut off the supply of goods for rì himself, and the rì bendevils, who are nervous about soldiers, simply do not have the strength to maintain their convoys, and they are afraid that the stronghold will be pulled out by us when they invest more troops, and if there are fewer troops invested, the convoy itself will be eaten by us. What's worse is that the resources of Rìben have long been depleted, and they simply cannot provide enough supplies for the troops, and even expect those troops who have in fact been surrounded by us to provide them with supplies through 'fighting to feed the war'. For example, the most important thing is food.

However, it is not 1941 or 1942 now, and any devil who is not long-sighted dares to come out and rob the food of the common people will definitely be shot in the head in our ambush. The devils are also afraid of death, and they don't dare to come out to grab food. Moreover, they already felt that they were about to be defeated, and their will was obviously depressed, and their fighting enthusiasm was greatly reduced. Since two months ago, there have even been cases of the rìben devils in the stronghold using their weapons to exchange food with us. You know, in the past, even if we surrounded the devils in an ambush, they would not surrender obediently when they were completely desperate, and they would even take the initiative to destroy their weapons before they died. And now, the extremely hungry devils no longer have the courage to come out and grab food, but choose to exchange food with us with the weapons in their hands. It is said that they will report to the above: 'We destroyed the first gun in the anti-rectification operation. ’

At first, the devils were only willing to exchange rifles with us, but recently, they are willing to take out machine guns and grenadiers. Lately, their superiors have asked them to 'collect' a shipment of food for the army that is attacking the Kuomintang, well, the embezzler group that I thought you mentioned earlier, or to the Pacific Ocean to the little ones who are at war with us.

The little rì in the stronghold contacted us through a Han jiān, that is, traitors who had taken refuge in Rì himself, and they were all undisciplined fellows, and when they saw that Rì himself was no longer good, they immediately ran to us in a hurry to beg us, hoping to exchange a batch of weapons for some food from us, so that they could complete the task of their superiors.

Of course, we can't accede to such a request, how can we allow the devils to eat enough and then go to southern China to kill the Chinese or the Pacific to kill us Americans? So our guerrilla leader replied crisply: 'Dream! Then I kicked the dog guy Jiān in the ass and kicked him out of our house. Once upon a time, this fat translator surnamed Song was so arrogant that he bullied the common people everywhere, often ate people's watermelons and didn't give money, and didn't give money to restaurants in the city. Now he is like a lost dog, which is so relieving.

In the afternoon, the dog man Jiān came running again, and brought a small rìben, that guy was the head of those small rìben in the stronghold, and he made a new suggestion: we give them the grain first, they give us a batch of weapons and the information on the departure time, route, and personnel ratio of the grain transport team sent above, and then we can grab the grain back on the way. The little devil thinks that this is a good way to get the best of both worlds, anyway, the grain is delivered to the hands of the grain transport team, and their task is successfully completed, as for the grain transport team does not transport the grain out, it is none of their business. And we got a batch of weapons for nothing without actually paying any food, which can be regarded as a complete thing.

I was present when Rì himself made this suggestion through the dog man Jiān. I could barely believe my eyes and ears at the time. Is this still one of those little rì books who talk about 'serving the emperor all day long'? We hesitated for a moment, and finally considered that Rì himself had no strength to deceive us at all, and that not even a fly could fly out of his stronghold if we wanted to. Fighting the convoy is already a piece of cake for us, who are now armed with a full set of rì weapons. By the way, we are not as good as before, relying on fighting devils and fighting Han jiān, our weapons have been replaced, and the original old equipment has been given to the militia. In addition to the lack of artillery, our equipment is already on par with the regular army.

Later, the devils were really trustworthy, and with their full cooperation, our people attacked the devil's convoy wearing the authentic rì military uniforms provided by the devil himself, snatched all the food back, and easily killed a dozen or so devils sent from above, and seized more than a dozen guns.

After that, we had more dealings with the rì themselves, and sometimes, when they really had no weapons to exchange food from us, they even asked us if we could be allowed to go out of the turret and find some work in the vicinity to fill their stomachs. Well, later, the devils of this squad in the stronghold, except for a few officers, all worked long hours in the homes of nearby landlords, and one even recognized a small local landlord as a godfather. According to the people in the neighborhood, those little rìbens really have some good ways of growing crops. And those rì themselves sometimes talk to the Chinese peasants about their hometown in half-baked Chinese, and about their difficult but stable life as farmers......

Lao Zhao, well, he is the political commissar of the guerrillas, similar to our chaplain. The Southern Type 14 pistol – the Chinese call it the Wang Ba Box – was given to me by Lao Zhao. He told me that this shows that the people of Rìben have begun to slowly wake up from the deception of the warlords under the education of facts, and victory is not far off! This victory will be a victory not only for China, but also for the United States, and even for the people! ……”

There is no doubt that this is a letter full of optimism. The dawn of victory is indeed clearly visible in this letter.

"Ron, this letter is interesting, isn't it?" "Lucy and I were discussing whether we could send this letter to the newspapers, and I think a lot of newspapers would be interested in this legendary story." So that we can have two legends in our family. ”

Ron knew that under the current conditions, there would definitely be a newspaper willing to send this letter. He also fully understands the pride that fathers have for their sons. However, it will not be long before the USSR, ** will turn from an ally of the Americans into an enemy. And in the United States, hysterical McCarthyism will also rise, and at that time, the hero of yesterday may become the object of suspicion.

After a moment's hesitation, Ron said to Nadya, who had been stretching her neck to read the letter with her, "Honey, go and see your mother, she must be washing those dates, see if you can help her." ”

Nadya stood up and said to old Sean, "Uncle, then I'll go over and see if I can help." Then he walked out with the same gait that Virgil had seen before, like the goddesses.

When Nadya walked out, Ron stepped forward, approached his father, and whispered, "Daddy, um...... You know...... The war is about to be won...... Many times, when an enemy is defeated, the former comrade becomes an enemy...... The guerrilla unit to which the second brother belonged to the TG, and in the future, this team may become an opponent of the United States like the Soviet Union. So ......"

At this moment, the door was pushed open, and Ms. Lucy was carrying a large plate full of dates, and walked in with Nadya and the two children who were running around happily.