This return trip, coupled with the reasons for the break and jet lag, from the perspective of time, it took four days, November 25, Monday, Li Junhao and his party returned to Shanghai.

He went directly to the headquarters to inquire about the situation in the past few days, and confirmed that everything was normal and there were no accidents, so he went home to rest with peace of mind.

After returning to Huhai, he immediately adjusted his mentality and no longer thought about Washington, after all, it was too far away from him, and his focus was still on the concession in Shanghai.

——

On December 1, the Consulate General in Shanghai received a telegram from Washington: Ognyan Lee Panson was promoted to Colonel and became the chief assistant to the National Security Adviser, deputy chief of staff of the General Headquarters of the US Far East Forces, deputy consul general of the Consulate General in Shanghai, commander of the Navy and the US Joint Command, and no longer the commander of the 327th Marine Regiment, and the regiment was succeeded by Colonel Xie Jinyuan.

This appointment caused unanimous surprise from all over the Consulate General, but while others were surprised by the position of Deputy Chief of Staff of the Far East Forces, only Acting Consul General Sheehan knew the meaning of this chief assistant, which surprised him unanimously, and he directly lowered his posture and regarded himself as a subordinate in his subsequent work.

Xie Jinyuan was surprised that a Chinese soldier was officially appointed as the commander of the 327th Regiment! In this case, he can only attribute it to the fact that Commander Pansen returned to China to do his work. This situation made him and other Chinese officers and soldiers very excited.

In Manila, the Philippines, in the US Far East Command, Lieutenant General MacArthur is very unhappy, you know, in the Far East Command, the chief of staff is still the commander of the Philippine Division, Major General Jonathan Wainwright, in fact, he has not really arrived, and the chief of staff of the headquarters is actually responsible to him; Now that the War Department has suddenly appointed a deputy chief of staff, the command will be partially dispersed, which he doesn't like very much!

In fact, the current Li Junhao does not want to care about the affairs of the Philippines at all, and the appointment of the deputy chief of staff of the Far East Army is also a chicken rib for him, but he knows the reason in his heart: because of his previous distrust of MacArthur, Secretary Stimson of the War Department made a certain compromise and gave him this appointment under external pressure.

Li Junhao could think that if he took up the post of deputy chief of staff, he would nominally be able to observe whether MacArthur had misbehaved nearby, and on the other hand, he would have to bear a certain amount of joint and several responsibility when something went wrong at the Far East Command! From this point of view, Minister Stimson still has a lot of ideas.

However, Minister Stimson didn't think of one thing, since it was a part-time job, what if Li Junhao didn't go to the post on the grounds that he was busy with his own work? If you go to work, what if you directly seize the command of the troops?

Li Junhao himself is also thinking about this issue, whether to take office? If so, when will you go? What measures should I take when I go? To what extent do things have to be done? …… He wouldn't have gone to the Philippines until he figured it out.

——

On Monday, December 2, Li Junhao, who had officially assumed the post of chief assistant to the National Security Adviser, accepted his first assignment: to write a report on the current situation in the Sino-Japanese War and to analyze the future strategic direction of the Japanese army.

In order to write the report, he spent several days inquiring about the information on the Chinese battlefield in the previous period, in addition to the movements of the Japanese army, the focus was on the current fierce confrontation on the battlefield in North China, the Eighth Route Army's counteroffensive (that is, the later known as the Battle of the Hundred Regiments), the current battle situation is in the final stage.

Li Junhao made a clear judgment that the situation of the current war in North China had gradually become clear, and the Eighth Route Army commanded by the underground party had the support of a large number of local armed forces and ordinary people, and compared with the Japanese army that left the occupied cities to fight, it had a more flexible combat advantage, and now it has a clear upper hand.

According to intelligence from various quarters, in the three and a half months from 20 August to early November alone, more than 1,800 large and small battles took place between the two sides, and the Eighth Route Army killed and wounded more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers and more than 5,000 puppet troops at the cost of more than 17,000 casualties, captured more than 280 Japanese soldiers and more than 18,000 puppet soldiers, uprooted more than 2,900 enemy strongholds, and destroyed more than 470 kilometers of railways and more than 1,500 kilometers of highways.

After suffering a blow, the Japanese army had to transfer two divisions from the frontal battlefield in Central China to strengthen the North China Front, in order to carry out a larger-scale retaliatory operation against the anti-Japanese base areas in North China.

At present, the direction of the battle is mainly concentrated in the Jin-Cha-Ji base area of the Eighth Route Army and in the northwest of Shanxi, and it is expected that there will be more than two months of fighting.

At present, the morale of the Chinese military and civilians is booming, and the possibility of the Japanese army winning this battle is extremely low.

In the process of sorting out the intelligence, some clues caught his attention, and together with the awakening of the memories of his past life, he found some bad signs, which were mentioned in the report:

On 19 October, He Yingqin, chief of the General Staff of the Military Commission of the Nationalist Government, and Bai Chongxi, deputy chief of the General Staff, sent a telegram to the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army, attributing the cause of the friction in North and Central China to the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army since the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and forcing the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army, which had persisted in the War of Resistance in the north and south of the Great River, to withdraw to the north of the Yellow River within one month.

Although the underground party had ordered the troops of the New Fourth Army stationed in southern Anhui to move north of the Yangtze River on November 9, the troops of the Kuomintang Third Theater (the combat areas were southern Jiangsu, southern Anhui, Zhejiang, and Fujian) were still carrying out large-scale movements......

He believed that this was an extremely dangerous signal, indicating that the Kuomintang government was about to attack the New Fourth Army in Jiangnan!

In his report, he solemnly pointed out that the Kuomintang government's move was obviously cooperating with the Japanese army to strangle against the Japanese forces, indicating that the government had a fascist tendency. Chairman Chiang in Chongqing is going further and further down the road of dictatorship, and the US government must be more vigilant against him.

In his report to Ayers, he put forward this point, but in fact, he had realized that this was the prelude to the "Southern Anhui Incident"! So that night, after reorganizing the language of the excerpted report, he sent it to Yan'an, hoping to play a positive role in saving the fate of the New Fourth Army military headquarters.

Regarding the analysis of the strategic direction of the Japanese army, Li Junhao asserted: After the fiasco of the Battle of Nomenkan last year, the Japanese army has lost the courage to advance north, and its next step can only be to go south!

At present, the relevant campaigns of the Japanese army in North China and other places are all aimed at consolidating the "rear" so that they can "advance southward" to seize the colonies of Britain, the United States, France, the Netherlands, and other countries in Southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific while the United States has not yet completed its war preparations and Britain is unable to look eastward......

Previously, on September 23, the Japanese army entered French Indochina, which was the first step of the trial.

(End of chapter)