Friday, July 10, 1931. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 infoOn this drizzly morning, the U.S. presidential residence on Pennsylvania Avenue looked the same as usual, except for a slightly larger number of reporters crouching outside the fence. Just after 8 o'clock in the morning, cars with British, Japanese, and Soviet Russian flags rushed in through the main entrance of the White House, and the reporters waiting at the scene immediately became excited.

If the news circulating through those abnormal channels is true, this is destined to be a day that will go down in history!

At about 10 o'clock in the morning, reporters waiting outside the White House noticed a group of people in dresses and top hats posing for a group photo in front of the porch on the south side of the White House, with US President Herbert Hoover and Secretary of State Henry **** Sheng in front of the column, and the crowd also included British Foreign Secretary Neville Chamberlain, Secretary of the Navy Frederick Field, Japanese Foreign Minister Kishigero Bihara, Secretary of the Navy Yuzaburo Kato, and Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov, who rarely appeared on international occasions.

Often, a group photo of the whole team signifies the success of the meeting - at least a temporary success. Up to this point, the US Government's press release department still refused to disclose to the media any specific circumstances of the meeting, but it is difficult to achieve absolute secrecy in such multi-party talks, and inside information about the United States, Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union reaching an agreement on jointly containing the expansion of the Allied bloc and clarifying the obligations of each country in the form of a secret treaty has long been circulating, and several newspapers and periodicals that are accustomed to gossip and lace news to attract people's attention have also published the contents of the treaty in a decent manner, and some of them are purely conjecture or even contradictory at first glance. In any case, however, the high-level meeting of the four countries has been a topic of widespread concern and heated discussion in the outside world for some time now, and has attracted foreign diplomats, journalists, and spies stationed in Washington to move around.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the middle of summer in Europe, as in previous years, the state administration was slowed down by the fact that German princes, nobles, and dignitaries went to vacation to castles and villas on the shores of the countryside or on the northern coast. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was over seventy years old, did not take a long cruise on a yacht in the North Sea, as he had done in his early years, but recuperated at Sanssouci Palace in Brandenburg, while the energetic Crown Prince Wilhelm Jr. took a warship to the Mediterranean to inspect colonial ports and visit friendly countries, as if the secret meeting of the United States, Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union in Washington had nothing to do with Germany, but this was obviously just an illusion seen by outsiders. Just after the foreign ministers of the four countries signed the secret treaty, the German military and political leaders soon received first-hand information: the terms of the secret treaty were basically the same as those previously discovered, and the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Japan basically formed a military alliance of a defensive nature, but the degree of closeness was not as close as that of the British, French, and Russian trilateral entente before 1915, and even if Germany went to war against the United States and Britain, Japan and Soviet Russia could still remain neutral; The United States, Britain, and Japan decided to circumvent the Limerick Naval Treaty, secretly build new capital ships and build new aircraft carriers without restriction in accordance with the standard displacement of 50,000 tons and the caliber of the main gun of 16 inches, strengthen exchanges and sharing in the field of naval technology and equipment, and provide naval and air force technical assistance to Soviet Russia. The United States, Britain, and Soviet Russia will also jointly assist the French Soviet regime and use the French Civil War to drain the energy of the Allies.

Contrary to the expectations of many international observers, Germany and its allies did not immediately take a strong counterattack against the four-nation secret pact between the United States, Britain, Japan, and the Soviet Union, nor did they further expand their armaments, but merely warned the heads of state and the people of these countries through the mainstream press in Europe: Germany could defeat the old Entente with the dominant power in 1914 and the new Entente in 1931. Sinking France and broken Russia are the best lessons!

In the complex international political arena, unofficial warnings issued through the mouth of the media are often the most powerless, but some shrewd international observers have also pointed out that the pragmatic Germans have already taken a series of countermeasures -- they have seized the opportunity of the intercontinental strategy by occupying the Azores, which has isolated Britain itself in wartime, and the efficiency of Soviet Russia in obtaining external aid will also be reduced by more than 80 percent. The South Pacific colonies such as the Mariana Islands and the Bismarck Islands carried out large-scale military construction, fortified a number of strategically important islands, and forcibly leased the French port of France in the French Kerguelen Islands and the port of Suares in Madagascar, thus establishing a maritime supply line from eastern and southern Africa to the South Pacific, and strengthening the connection between the mainland and the eastern colonies.

No matter what international observers think and say, and how the international situation develops, it will ultimately be revealed by time. On July 26, 161 German paratroopers descended from the sky and raided a farm in the southern Algerian town of Wadima, where they attacked the members of the Supreme Council of the French Soviets who were assembled, and captured liaison officers from the United States, Britain, and Soviet Russia on the spot.

The German airborne forces were extremely domineering, but the Russian army also quickly demonstrated the power of the red world with victory: in the North Caucasus, the Russian army launched a fierce offensive, winning successive battles, capturing Grozny from the Ottoman Turkish army in one fell swoop, and then breaking through the entire defense line of the Turkish army, and inflicting heavy losses on Turkey's ace unit - the all-German army 1st Division in a campaign of movement. By the end of October, the Turkish army had been completely expelled from the North Caucasus, the Soviet Russian army approached the Baku oil field, Germany had to intervene, but the armistice conditions proposed by Moscow were difficult for Germany and Turkey to accept, Istanbul decided to continue to increase troops, and Germany also urgently provided Turkey with a large number of tanks and artillery, but the Turkish army's counterattack ended in a crushing defeat a week later, and the mountain of baggage became the trophies of the Soviet Russian army, which disgraced the prestige and loss of face of the Allied camp.

On November 26, 1931, when the war in the Caucasus was in full swing, the International Conference on Peace and Disarmament initiated by Austria-Hungary was held in Viana, attended by representatives from 77 countries, and 26 heads of government attended Vienna in person. Judging from the specifications of the conference and the response of various countries in the world, the efforts of Austrian Emperor Karl I were not in vain, but although the anti-war disarmament was highly praised by many international celebrities, the meeting, which lasted for more than 10 days, failed to achieve any substantive results in the field of anti-war disarmament. Its greatest significance is that it gives the political leaders of the opposing camps a chance to negotiate face-to-face, and mutual compromise and concession have eased the current tension to a certain extent. Shortly after the conclusion of the Conference on Disarmament, the heads of State of South America met in the capital of Uruguay and made a clear demarcation of the disputed territories of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Bolivia and signed a series of memorandums on strengthening economic and trade cooperation, thus stabilizing the situation in South America.

Immediately afterwards, Russia and Turkey signed an armistice agreement in Baku, and Germany, Russia and Turkey also resumed talks on the joint development of oil resources and the distribution of benefits in Transcaucasia, and made adjustments to a certain extent on the basis of the Baku agreement in 1916 to ensure the needs of the development of heavy industry in Soviet Russia. With the war in the Caucasus subsided, the first light of 1932 was ushered in in a positive atmosphere, but it was also the last calm before the storm. In the Far East, the Japanese government, mired in an economic crisis, was impatient to launch a full-scale war of aggression against China, and this time, not only did the United States and Britain stand idly by and watch Japan's aggression, but the Soviet Russian government and the Allied bloc did not take tough intervention and sanctions as the Japanese army had previously annexed Northeast China, but this did not mean that Japan could do whatever it wanted. The actions of the Japanese Government and the army have aroused the disgust and even hostility of the people of various countries, Japan's diplomatic image has plummeted, trade exports have been boycotted, hundreds of volunteers have gone to the East to help the Chinese Government resist aggression, weapons and ammunition purchased by people from all walks of life in various countries have been transported to the hands of the Chinese army through Qingdao and Hong Kong, where the Japanese Navy is unable to implement the blockade, and the stubborn resistance of the Chinese military and civilians has been added. Japan's delusion of annihilating China in three months was ruthlessly powdered, the well-trained Japanese army was mired in aggression, and the strong Japanese navy was almost useless.

In April 1932, shortly after April Fool's Day, the British media shook out the shocking news: the Irish government secretly exported a large quantity of military supplies to China, including 200 new fighter jets, and sent a large number of experienced technical instructors to the Chinese army. Prior to this, the Japanese army had captured many foreign volunteers on the battlefield, but after all, they were all fighting in their individual capacities, but Ireland's move was an official act, and the Japanese government immediately asked the German government to put pressure on Ireland to try to get Ireland to cancel the contract and recall the personnel. Although the German government had reached a secret consensus with Japan, it was never made clear in the form of a paper treaty, leaving the Japanese army in China with no time to take care of other strategic interests that were fully in line with Germany's strategic interests.

In July 1932, the Ottoman Turkey, which had been greatly damaged in the Caucasian War, was hit again, and the Iranians were unable to resist the rule of the Ottoman Empire and launched an uprising. In order to protect the oil fields invested and operated by their own countries, Germany and Italy successively sent troops to participate in the war, the German fleet stationed in the Persian Gulf carried out a complete blockade of the Iranian coast, and the Italian fleet also sailed to the Gulf of Oman to carry out joint operations with the German navy. The two camps are once again in indirect dialogue.

(End of chapter)