.“ I am willing to sprinkle this last drop of blood with my loyal and brave soldiers, in the head of Bohai Bay, in the Great Wall caves, for the justice of mankind, for the survival of the nation, for the shame of the country, for the military to build a personality, to comfort the soul of my ancestors in the sky, and to save the misery of my people! ——When the Great Wall War of Resistance broke out, He Zhuguo, commander of the 9th Brigade of the Northeast Army stationed in Shanhaiguan, published the "Letter to the Soldiers".

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The first pass in the world, Shanhaiguan.

The cold wind in the winter blows tighter than a gust, the sun is brilliant, but it can't bring much warmth, Xiongguan Mandao is magnificent, but it is permeated under the choking gunsmoke. There were no free birds in sight in the sky, and even the few clouds that were there were were eager to leave the bloody battlefield as soon as possible.

Behind the battlements of the south gate wall, a group of exhausted soldiers were resting. Most of them were wounded, their military uniforms blackened by gunpowder were full of holes cut by stones and shrapnel, they had no steel helmets, no cannons, and the weapons in their hands were rifles of different styles and a few machine guns, their eyes were bloodshot, and their eyes were full of hatred.

Taking advantage of the cessation of the artillery fire, the medical soldiers were busy bandaging the wounds of the wounded, and the stretcher team hurried to carry the seriously injured down, and several of them also shouted that death would make it difficult for the little devils to move forward, and they would also fight back to the northeast......

Between the two stacks of arrows there was a slightly immature face, judging from the silhouette and skin of the boy was no more than seventeen or eighteen years old, but the military uniform and the spear in his hand gave people a kind of incongruous maturity. The wary eyes looked out of the city for a moment, and then shrank back when there was movement again.

"Big brother, the little devil is ready to attack again!"

Beside the soldier was a veteran who was more than a decade older than him, and the veteran was tying several grenades together with a cloth strap of leggings, and he only turned his head to look out of the city slightly, "Huh! Come on, let them taste the power of our Northeast Army! ”

The little soldier looked at the old soldier busy and asked, "Big brother, why is the little devil so tricky?" It's planes and artillery. And that hard pimple! ”

"What an iron lump, that's called a tank! In the past, our Northeast Army also had it, but Dashuai spent a lot of oceans to buy it from abroad, which is actually similar to a car, just dressed in an iron sheet! But don't worry, see it, we'll use these grenades to turn them into a pile of scrap metal in a while, and blow up the turtle grandson in there! He said. The veteran pulled the cloth strap hard, tied a dead knot, and unscrewed the iron lids of the grenades one by one to tie the cables together.

"This ...... Okay? "The little soldier is obviously a little bit lacking in confidence.

The veteran put the simple cluster grenade beside him and patted the soldier on the shoulder, "Quasi!"

Once upon a time, I heard a brother who drove a tank say that all you need to do is stuff a bundle of grenades under the belly of the tank, and keep it useless! ”

"Oh......" The soldiers looked out of the city again, the Japanese soldiers were still preparing for a new attack, and four or five Japanese tanks were moving out of the range of machine guns. That's when it happened.

There was a buzzing sound from the direction of Haiti.

"Enemy planes! Beware of concealment! An officer not far away shouted.

The creep shrank back at the base of the wall. This Shanhaiguan was called "Yuguan" in ancient times, according to the mountain to control the sea, the terrain is dangerous, known as "the two capitals lock key no return." With the fall of the three eastern provinces, the Japanese Kwantung Army in the northeast advanced step by step from outside the pass, and the Japanese garrison in Tianjin continued to harass from the pass, and Shanhaiguan was already in the state of being attacked by the enemy on the back of the abdomen.

As early as the beginning of the century, the signing of the "Xinchou Treaty" gave the great powers the right to garrison troops along the line from Beijing through Tianjin to Shanhaiguan, and among them, Japan garrisoned the most, and Japan had set up a gendarmerie substation and garrison in Shanhaiguan long before the war of aggression against China. The south and east gates of Shanhaiguan are under the supervision of the Japanese garrison, there is a Japanese garrison in Qinhuangdao not far from the southwest, there are also Japanese warships and aircraft carriers on the sea, and the Chinese garrison near Shanhaiguan is only less than 10,000 people in the 9th Brigade of the Northeast Army.

Not long after, a group of Japanese carrier-based planes flew over Shanhaiguan, completely ignoring the pitiful machine-gun fire of the Chinese defenders, and wantonly hovering in the air, searching for targets, and dropping bombs and strafing.

"Get down!"

After being crushed under the veteran. The creep suddenly felt a wave of dizziness, and his ears were ringing violently. He tried to push the veteran away, but found that the veteran was very heavy and was still humming in a low voice, and the little soldier quickly felt the hot and humid liquid on his face, and he felt bad, and when he got up, he found that the veteran was covered in blood.

"Big brother, big brother!" The soldier was so anxious that he was about to cry, he looked left and right, and shouted, "Medic! Paramedics! ”

But there were wounded people everywhere, and at the foot of the wall not far away was a medic lying in a pool of blood.

The veteran opened his eyes, his lips moved slightly, and the little soldier leaned his ears over, only to hear an intermittent sentence:

"Hit ...... Hit back ...... Northeast...... Northeast...... Go to ......"

Before the Japanese artillery fire rang out, the veteran stopped breathing and his eyes were wide open.

Heavy artillery fire once again ravaged the ancient walls, but despite the flying shrapnel and rubble, the 14-meter-high and 7-meter-thick walls remained unmoved. Under the desperate resistance of the Chinese defenders, the Japanese attack was once again crushed.

The soldier killed three devils in this battle, avenging the veteran and earning one for himself.

However, it did not take long for the Japanese warships to begin to bombard the Chengguan with heavy artillery from the sea, and the Japanese carrier-based planes painted with plaster marks also made frequent sorties, and finally blasted a gap in a relatively weak section of the Great Wall under the onslaught, and the platoon of the small soldiers was urgently transferred to plug the gap.

After the artillery fire stopped, the Japanese ground forces really shifted the direction of the main attack to the side of the gap, hundreds of Japanese soldiers in the cover of more than ten tanks (the historical Battle of Shanhaiguan Japanese army invested more than 3,000 infantry, 33 small armored trains and 20 tanks) babbled towards this side, the Chinese defenders' fire swept down many Japanese soldiers, but the rifle and machine gun bullets were helpless to those iron lumps.

The creep clung to the bundle of grenades left behind by the veteran.

"Under the belly of the tank!" The creep muttered softly.

The cacophony of metal grinding drew closer, and one Japanese tank was the first to climb the gentle rubble slope of the gap, and soon a second climbed up. There were several Chinese soldiers who carried grenades or explosive packs like the minions. The first batch of rifles, machine guns, artillery and anti-tank guns from the German-aided areas had already arrived in China, but they were given priority to the descendants of the Nanking government, and the "motley army" such as the Northeast Army could not be rotated at all. Therefore, when the figure of the Japanese tank appeared at the top of the gentle slope of the gap, the sad and respectable Chinese soldiers could only fight them with their flesh and blood. The soldier's last memory was that of pulling the cable of a grenade as the Japanese tank drove past him. At that time, he had at least a dozen machine-gun bullets in his body, leaving bloody holes in the ground.

There was a loud bang, the Japanese tank drooped on the barrel and wilted in place, the plaster flag planted in the turret was torn off by shrapnel at some point, and the blood of the strong man was not shed in vain, but more tanks rumbled past the side.

"Go back to the Northeast!" This was the last memory in the soldier's mind.

Just two days later, the Chinese defenders, who had suffered more than half of the casualties, were ordered to retreat, and Shanhaiguan fell.

The rapid fall of Shanhaiguan soon set off another wave of anti-Japanese protests in China, at the unanimous demand of the people of the whole country and patriots of all parties. The Nanjing government then appointed Zhang Xueliang as the commander-in-chief of the garrisons along the Great Wall, intending to rely on the Great Wall to prevent the Japanese army from entering the pass.

At the same time, the Japanese army, which won the "easy" victory at Shanhaiguan, began to fully attack the defense line of the Great Wall guarded by the squadron after a little adjustment, and invaded Rehe in a big way. Under the cover of heavy artillery, aircraft, and mechanized troops, the Japanese army advanced rapidly, and seemed to be getting closer and closer to the goal of "annihilating China in March."

Tokyo, Japan.

"Your country must stop its aggressive actions against China! Instantly! Right away! Right now! ”

The negotiator appointed by the Kaiser and the German government von Fernandes. Baron Rrangel is a gentleman with a lot of grace, and his many years of diplomatic career have cultivated his unfazed character, and he is also well-known internationally, but at this time. He used several adverbs in a row. This shows how urgent this requirement is.

Facing Baron Wrangel was Japan's Prime Minister Yoshiichi Tanaka, who was also Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a diehard who supported and instigated the war of aggression against China. Also an extremely cunning politician and diplomat, he spread his hands and looked puzzled.

"Oh, your Excellency the Baron, I must reiterate once again that this is not an invasion, but an internal affair of the peoples of East Asia! We are only claiming our former lands for our allies, the Manchurian royal family of China! ”

Although Baron Wrangel was nearly fifty years old, his burly figure still looked imposing, and he shook his head, "Your Excellency the Prime Minister. As we all know, the Manchurian royal family has long since withdrawn from the stage of history along with the Qing Dynasty, and since the Chinese people have chosen a democratic government and system, why should your country interfere? ”

"No, no, no, the monarchy has not withdrawn from the stage of history, and we in Japan and you Germany have developed very well under the monarchy. I don't think there is any system in this world that is better than this monarchy that has been handed down for thousands of years! What Tanaka said seems to be very reasonable, but in fact, it is a replacement of the concept of "withdrawing from the stage of history" mentioned by Grant, and whether the Chinese monarchy exists is not the same as that of the monarchies of other countries in the world.

"We need a peaceful environment for our negotiations, otherwise we ......" Baron Wrangel had to once again move out of the ongoing negotiations between the two countries, even though the negotiations had reached a mutually agreeable conclusion more than a month earlier. However, the deliberate entanglement over the details has allowed the negotiations to drag on to this day.

If it weren't for the fact that Germany held three strongholds that posed a huge threat to Japan, Japan would not have been so patient with the German negotiators, and what was even more unacceptable to the Japanese Government and military department was the frequent "misnavigation" of German long-range bombers; in order to solve this problem, the Japanese military even offered to have Japanese planes pilot the German fighters flying between Vladivostok, Sakhalin, and Qingdao free of charge, and the German Government initially accepted this proposal. However, the difference in altitude between the flights of the two aircraft made it impossible to continue this pilotage at all. The Japanese side proposed that the German bombers reduce their altitude when flying, but the German side said that flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters is a system regulation and cannot be changed for some special reasons, so after entering December, German bombers still appear over the Japanese archipelago from time to time.

"Your Excellency, the war there is only a minor dispute between East Asian neighbors, and it is not enough to affect the air in Tokyo, is it?" Tanaka said with a smile, and that kind of smiling expression was disgusting.

"As a country with a sense of justice, civilization and influence in the world, Germany cannot sit idly by and watch the gross violation of the sovereignty of a country! Your country and China are both friendly countries of Germany, so we are all the more reluctant to see such uncivilized behavior among you! Baron Wrangel added at the end of the day, "Under the Hague Convention No. 3 of 1907, undeclared war is illegal!" ”

"No, no, no, Your Excellency, the Baron!" Tanaka shook his right hand quickly, "This is not a war, it's just an internal conflict between the Manchurian government of China and the Nationalist government, and the Japanese Empire is just doing the Manchurian government a favor from the standpoint of an ally!" ”

Wrangel looked at this guy with wide eyes, "Manchurian government? Your Excellency, Prime Minister, as far as I know, the government of Manchuria collapsed in 1911! Isn't it? ”

"Well...... Tanaka had a sly smile on his face, "The Manchurian government has actually always existed, but it has not been in power for various reasons!" In fact, Emperor Puyi is already preparing for the restoration of his kingdom in Manchuria with our help! ”

"Your Excellency the Prime Minister!" Baron Wrangel sighed lightly, "I beg your pardon for saying that the sovereignty of the three northeastern provinces belongs to the Chinese government, and it is illegal for your country to use force to help the Manchurian imperial family 'recover' in Northeast China, even if Manchukuo really 'came back from the dead', it is because of the existence of the Japanese army and not from the movement of national self-determination!" If all this really happens, Germany will reserve the right to take further measures! ”

Tanaka was stunned, the other party's words could be big or small, it could be a simple diplomatic rhetoric, or it could be a warning that Germany would not rule out the use of force to punish "illegal actions", and in the current situation, the German baron's meaning was elusive to him.