In the blink of an eye, 1940 had come to an end. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoAlthough John's life in the military school was a little harder, it was still full and pleasant. Especially without the interference of those messy things in the outside world, he can calm down and study something seriously, so that his slightly impetuous heart before has gradually calmed down.

Although the outside world is still disturbed, John has turned most of his attention to learning and researching military knowledge, which is quite a bit of "hiding in a small building to become a unity, and managing his winter, summer, spring and autumn".

After more than a month of repeated deliberation, John's thesis on the concealment and camouflage tactics of the army unit has gradually taken shape. Although it still needs to be further polished, many of the ideas in the article have been praised by many teachers and students.

In particular, Principal McNair has been very interested in this paper since he read John's thesis proposal. Not only did he personally summon John many times to discuss this new tactic with him, but he also enthusiastically recommended a lot of relevant materials to John.

John, of course, did not let go of this opportunity, and did everything he could, and finally succeeded in convincing McNair to serve as his final thesis advisor.

Don't underestimate just the instructor of the final thesis, if all the students in the school are McNair's disciples, John is almost equivalent to becoming a disciple from a registered disciple, which means that his relationship with McNair has surpassed that of most military school students. Although this more or less contains the meaning of conservatives showing favor to Stimson, it also shows that McNair, a veteran general in the army, still recognizes John's military theoretical level.

Behind him stands McNair, the instructor, and in the future this paper will inevitably be published in domestic military theory journals. When the time comes, let's see who else dares to say that John is a military "layman".

In fact, the reason why John was able to quickly gain McNair's recognition was thanks to an ancient Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu.

At first, when John first started writing, the biggest headache was how to raise the scattered knowledge he knew in his previous life to the level of theory. After all, in his previous life, he was just an amateur military enthusiast, and he only knew a rough idea of many things, and it was still impossible to summarize and summarize systematic tactical theories.

Fortunately, he was a Chinese in his previous life, and compared with the vast majority of Westerners, he had a huge advantage, that is, he had a large number of Eastern military theory works to learn from. Don't look at the tactics of concealment and camouflage, which are still at the forefront of the West at this time, the Chinese ancestors have long played this trick badly.

As early as the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, Sun Bin used a similar tactic of "increasing troops and reducing focus". This tactic is also discussed in "The Art of War: Fiction and Reality". Even in the "Thirty-six Strategies", which is well known to women and children, there are also contents related to this tactic, such as hiding from the sky and crossing the sea, secretly displaying warehouses, making things out of nothing, and stealing beams and changing pillars.

Although there are thousands of years in time and the forms of warfare are no longer the same, the basic tactical principles are still the same. Some ancient practices can still achieve good results with a makeover.

For example, "increase troops and reduce the number of foci", Sun Bin was able to induce Pang Juan by changing the number of marching foci, so that he could make a wrong judgment on the number of Qi troops. Now, the U.S. military can also achieve the same goal by increasing or removing the call signs of military radios.

You must know that in the 40s, there were no spy satellites and high-altitude reconnaissance planes, and it was difficult to grasp the accurate situation of the enemy's military strength by relying on ordinary planes and manpower reconnaissance alone. It is currently common practice to estimate the size of the other party's radio station based on its communications.

Therefore, as long as the US military organizes a large number of military radios of different power levels and simulates a complete set of radio communications between group armies, corps, divisions, and regiments, it is very easy to fabricate a large army.

In order to make his thesis more theoretical, John also spent a whole day finding an English translation of "The Art of War" from the library of the Fort Leavenworth Military Academy.

In the beginning, John was just trying to find a reason for his thesis. After all, it is incredible, a person who has no combat experience, to invent a completely new set of tactics out of thin air. If he had an English translation of The Art of War, he could pretend to be inspired by the military wisdom of the East in the book.

However, when John flipped through the book "The Art of War" that he found in the library, he couldn't help but be disappointed. In his previous life, he only knew that "The Art of War" had been transmitted to the West as early as the 18th century, and there were translations in English, French, German, and Russian. In the United States, 21 years ago, the book was also common, and many schools (not only military schools but also business schools) made it a reference book.

But I didn't expect that at this time in 1940, "The Art of War" was so unappreciated in the American military circles. The "Art of War" in the collection of Fort Leavenworth Military Academy is not actually published in the United States, but a Giles translation published in Britain in 1910 (the earliest single copy of "The Art of War" in the United States was published by the Harrisburg Military Publishing Company in 1949).

And Giles, the assistant curator of the British Museum's Oriental Books and Manuscripts Gallery, was only a sinologist, not a soldier, and when he translated "The Art of War", he was wrong in the first sentence. Translate the word "soldier" in "soldier, national affairs" into art-of-war (the art of war).

Moreover, this edition of "The Art of War" is too chewy, and the diction is quite beautiful and rhythmic, but it clearly has the style of English literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are a lot of "antique" words in it that were not commonly used at all in American English in the 40s. It's sad that this book has been shelved for so many years, and no one cares.

Seeing the pearl of the treasure of the "old ancestor" in his previous life, John couldn't help it. How could such a classic book be buried because of translation problems? Although he is not a translator, and he doesn't know what letter, da, and elegance are, he has read both the Chinese and English versions of "The Art of War" in his previous life.

It just so happens that the Giles edition of "The Art of War" in my hand is numbered article by sentence and translated in Chinese and English. He immediately decided to take matters into his own hands, relying on his own understanding and memory of the later translation of Brigadier General Griffiths of the United States Marine Corps (this version was included in the "Chinese Masterpieces Series" by UNESCO, and is the most widely disseminated English translation of "The Art of War" in the world), and retranslated the more than 6,000 words.

At the same time as translating, John did not forget to add some personal goods, combined with some modern Western military theories and war examples, and annotated some of the contents of "The Art of War", focusing on the guiding significance of this book for modern warfare.

Sure enough, gold always shines. After John's translation, he and "The Art of War" quickly became a hot topic in military schools.

At first, it was only Van Vliet and a few other good classmates who became interested in John's translation of the book and began to circulate it. Then, after seeing John's translation, a teacher took a special class for John to introduce the Art of War to the students in the class and organize a discussion.

Then, the whole school learned that there was a colonel named Vanderbilt who was a "sinologist" who had translated an Oriental military book from more than 2,000 years ago.

In the end, even Principal McNair was alarmed. After seeing John's translation and learning that he had been inspired by it to develop ideas that coincided with his own (the study of concealment and camouflage tactics), McNair decided that John was a young man with military talent that deserved to be cultivated. This, along with a few other factors, led to McNair's personal appointment as John's thesis advisor.

In short, thanks to the blessing of "Sun Tzu", John, a "sinologist" with two knives and a newcomer to military theory research, became McNair's "disciple". Unbeknownst to a satisfied John, an even greater "surprise" awaited him.