What is history: it is the echo of the past to the future, the reflection of the future on the past. - Hugo
After the September 18 Incident, the first shot against the Japanese Kou was fired by Huang Xiansheng, then police chief of Liaoning Province and director of the Shenyang Municipal Public Security Bureau. At that time, he led more than 2,000 police officers to engage in street battles with the Japanese army in Shenyang, which was in sharp contrast to the regular army in the northeast that retreated without a fight.
So, after 14 years of arduous resistance, who fired the last shot at the Japanese?
Although Japan surrendered, the war continued
Many people feel that the answer is self-evident.
On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. military dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, firing its "last shot" in World War II with a cross-era weapon.
In fact, the United States has also brewed a "Operation Downfall", the largest landing operation in the history of the expected 2.5 million troops to capture all of Japan, but this "national annihilation blow" that points directly to the heart of Japan has not been able to be implemented.
On August 8, the Soviet army that ended the war against Germany also set off the "August Storm" in a big way, and the puppet state of Manchukuo, which Japan had painstakingly managed, collapsed within a month.
Seeing that the tide was gone, Japanese Emperor Hirohito published the famous "Edict of the End of the War" to the world on August 15. The next morning, Chiang Kai-shek, in the name of the chairman of the government of the Republic of China, delivered a radio speech to the military and people of the whole country, announcing that the whole country would have a 3-day holiday to celebrate the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and the suffering people were instantly immersed in a sea of joy.
stop! Although it was true that people at that time were ecstatic about the victory of the war, this did not mean that the war had completely subsided. Especially on the land battlefield in the east, where the situation is complex and changeable, the all-out counteroffensive is not a simple final blow, but more like the opening of a new contest mixed with various political factors.
Let's look first at the frontal battlefield dominated by the Kuomintang.
Many previous articles have referred to the Battle of Zhijiang (April 9 to June 7, 1945) in Hunan as the last battle of the Nationalist army against Japan, but the Battle of Nanyang (March 21 to August 19, 1945) in Henan is more in line with this historical positioning, from the research of scholar Qin Jun in recent years.
The Chinese side invested 148,000 troops and the Japanese side invested more than 70,000 troops, and the West Gorge Pass became the most fiercely contested area between the two sides. The reason why the battle lasted until after August 15, because the Japanese army surrounded by the Chinese army completely lost contact with the outside world, and still stubbornly carried out half an hour of shelling every day, until August 20, when he laid down his weapons and unconditionally accepted the surrender order issued by The First Theater of Operations of China.
The next day, Takeo Imai, a representative sent by Japan, arrived at Zhijiang and contacted He Yingqin, then commander-in-chief of the Nationalist Army, on specific matters of surrender, and the two sides ended the war in an all-round way.
Look at the battlefield behind enemy lines dominated by the Communists.
On August 9, 1945, Mao Zedong issued a public statement entitled "The Last Battle Against the Japanese Kou"; two days later, Zhu De, in the name of the commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army, issued seven consecutive orders to the Chinese Communists in various localities, demanding that all departments carry out the surrender work against the Japanese puppet army and resolutely eliminate all enemies who stubbornly resisted surrender. At the behest of the United States and in consultation with Chiang Ri, all 15 surrendered areas in China were solely responsible for the Nationalist troops, and the Japanese army in China only accepted surrender orders from the Nationalist government, ignored all the surrender demands of the Chinese Communists, and even allowed them to use the method of "armed self-defense" to refuse.
However, just as Zhang Mazi's classic line in "Let the Bullets Fly" - "If he is decent, you will let him be decent, if he is not decent, you will help him decent", for the Japanese army that voluntarily laid down its weapons, the Eighth Route Army gave it the qualification to be surrendered, and for those who resisted to the end, they gave a heavy blow.
During the forced landing operation (August 15 to September 2, 1945), the Eighth Route Army liberated more than 150 small and medium-sized cities and counties, and achieved two major victories:
The first is that the Eighth Route Army, with the strategic cooperation of the Soviet Army, liberated Zhangjiakou, the capital of Chahar Province during the Republic of China, on August 23, which was the only large city within the liberated area after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War;
The second was that the Northeast Anti-Japanese League and underground party organizations assisted the main force of the Soviet army and captured the Hutou Fortress in Hulin, Heilongjiang Province, on August 26, which was the last major battle between the Japanese army and the Allies, and was later called "the end of World War II here".
Unlike the Japanese army at Xixiakou, the Japanese troops inside Hutou Fortress actually heard the "Edict of the End of the War" on the radio, but the already crazy senior officers firmly believed that this was the enemy's psychological warfare propaganda, forcing the defenders to fight until the entire army was destroyed, and extending the war that was already going to end for another 11 days. A similar situation occurred in the Dongning Fortress in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang Province, where there were still small signs of Japanese activity after August 15, when they disappeared completely under Soviet fire until August 30.
▲ Liberation of Zhangjiakou classic picture: great rivers and mountains
2. The Japanese rebellion during the War of Liberation
On September 2, 1945, representatives of Japan and representatives of allied countries formally completed the legal procedures for signing the instrument of unconditional surrender on the battleship "Missouri" of the United States Navy, and the history of World War II and the world anti-fascist struggle finally came to an end. The good news was the day after it was widely disseminated in The country, which is why we chose to commemorate the victory of the War of Resistance on September 3.
On September 9, Ninji Okamura, then commander-in-chief of the "China Dispatch Army", on behalf of more than 1.28 million Japanese troops, including Japanese troops in Taiwan and Vietnam, excluding the Kwantung Army in the northeast, submitted a surrender letter to the government of the Republic of China in Nanjing, leaving a classic picture that will forever be recorded in history.
Subsequently, the 16 surrendered areas in the Chinese Theater (including the North Vietnamese area outside the country) held their own surrender ceremonies. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (May 3, 1946 – November 12, 1948) began to prepare for the trial of Japan's war crimes, and on the one hand, China sent people to Tokyo to participate in the whole process, and at the same time organized local high courts and 10 special military tribunals in China to try guilty Japanese military and political personnel, traitors, spies, etc., and 145 people, including "Nanjing Butcher" Gu Shoufu, were duly punished with justice.
If you look at this timeline alone, most people will not feel that there is anything unique, and the process of dealing with Germany after the defeat of Germany in Europe and the United States is basically the same. But when we compare this timeline on a larger scale, the history after Japan's surrender becomes complicated.
Using the yardstick of cold war history, we will clearly see the change in the attitude of the United States in dealing with Japan's "tightening before and loosening up later"; to this day, European and American countries and China and Russia have not been able to keep pace on the issue of commemorating World War II.
At that time, the Nationalist government did not allow the Chinese communists to participate in all official surrender ceremonies, and connived at the rebellion of some Japanese troops, forcing the Communists to "carry out the War of Resistance to the end" and started a "post-war war" against the Japanese Kou.
First of all, for those Japanese troops who are within the scope of the CHINESE Communists' armed activities and have not yet participated in the kuomintang's surrender activities, our side has independently held corresponding surrender ceremonies, of which the more representative ones are as follows:
(1) In December 1945, the Shagou Surrender, that is, the Lunan Railway Brigade of the Eighth Route Army completed the surrender of about 1,000 Japanese troops at the Shagou Railway Station in Lincheng, Zaozhuang, Shandong Province;
(2) In December 1945, gaoyou was surrendered, that is, the Central China Field Army completed the surrender of 891 Japanese troops and 3493 puppet troops in Gaoyou City, Jiangsu Province;
(3) In January 1946, Huafeng was surrendered, that is, the first column of the Shandong Field Army completed the surrender of about 3,000 Japanese troops at the East Taiping Station of Jinpu Road in the Huafeng Mining Area of Shandong.
Of particular note is the Battle of Gaoyou, which took place from December 19 to 26, 1945, when the Central China Field Army under the leadership of Su Yu used a combination of armed attack and psychological warfare to persuade surrender, and took Gaoyou City, which had been occupied by the Japanese army for 6 years, at a small cost in just one week. Of course, the Nationalist government, which has always hoped that the Japanese puppet army will help it "watch" Gaoyoucheng and wait for the time to be ripe to take over, will certainly not give any positive evaluation to this "last battle of the anti-Japanese resistance" or award any medals to those who participated in the war.
▲Gaoyou's surrender ceremony
Second, the Communist Party gave severe force punishment to the Japanese fascist diehard forces that were rebelling under the banner of "anti-communism." After Japan's defeat in the war, the Japanese army and overseas Chinese in China were repatriated to China in batches, but due to the excessive number and long time, many Japanese people were more or less involved in the historical process of the Kuomintang civil war, which was particularly typical in the northeast region that had long been colonized by Japan, such as the Northeast Field Army, which retained many Japanese technicians and medical personnel. The only criterion for judging friends and foes by the National Government is "anti-communism", and in the case of the northeast, the following two examples are more representative.
First, in November 1945, the Liaoning Anshan Bandit Campaign. In order to defend this newly liberated industrial city, the eighth route army troops engaged in a fierce three-day battle with the 3,700-strong Deng Guoqing bandit gang, annihilating in one fell swoop this reactionary force composed of remnants of the Kwantung Army, the military police and military police of puppet Manchukuo, Kuomintang agents, and local bandits. During the same period, the Anshan Municipal Public Security Bureau also cracked the criminal plan of Yujiro Yamazai, Ji Fengwu, and others to "create riots to storm the party and government organs and meet the Kuomintang Central Army inside and outside."
Second, in February 1946, the Jilin Tonghua Counter-Riot Operation. Sun Gengyao, secretary of the Kuomintang Tonghua County Party Department, with the support of the Kuomintang Liaoning Provincial Party Department, reached a so-called "cooperation agreement" with Fujita Shihiko, former chief of staff of the 125th Division of the Kwantung Army, intending to launch a full-scale riot with the surrendered Japanese army as the main force, japanese overseas Chinese traitors and Kuomintang personnel assisting from the side; in the early morning of February 3, About 13,000 rioters, including nearly 4,000 Japanese, launched an attack on the Communist party and government organs, and the Eighth Route Army, with a limited force of more than 1,000 people, achieved brilliant results in one day of killing more than 1,000 enemy and capturing more than 3,000 enemy. Historical materials of this event were compiled by the Jilin Cultural and Historical Committee in 1985 as "Why Did They Die in China?" " book, and later filmed the TV series of the same name. However, in view of the fact that the Japanese army involved in the riots had previously been disarmed, this counter-riot operation could not shake the status of the "last battle of the anti-Japanese war" in the Gaoyou Campaign.
Under the pretext of "preventing the redization of Shanxi," Yan Xishan spent a lot of money to hire a large number of Japanese and Japanese overseas Chinese for his own use, with the number exceeding 10,000 at its peak, and added many Chinese soldiers to accept the command of Japanese officers and form the "Brand-new Independent Tenth General Brigade" (later renamed the "Taiyuan Appeasement Office Teaching Corps"). Imamura Fangce, commander of the brigade of the 3rd Independent Mixed Brigade of the former "North China Dispatch Army", served as the commander of the headquarters, and Yuan Quanxin, commander of the independent 14th Brigade, served as the deputy commander of the Taiyuan Appeasement Office. Later, most of these remnants of the Shanxi Japanese returned to China between 1947 and 1949, and the rest were completely annihilated by the People's Liberation Army in the Battle of Taiyuan from October 1948 to April 1949.
According to statistics, during the entire Liberation War, the number of japanese troops left in Shanxi was more than 500, and the number of captured people was about 1,000, and Yuanquan Xin and Imamura Fangce committed suicide in despair, while another important leader, Hiroshi Shirono, accepted the trial of New China after being captured, and confessed in court that he participated in commanding the remnants of the Japanese army against the PLA and witnessed the Japanese chemical troops firing poison gas bombs at the PLA positions.
On April 23, 1949, with the liberation of Taiyuan, the history of japanese invasion of China, which was forcibly extended by Yan Xishan, was completely cut off by the People's Liberation Army, and no Japanese invaders could be seen running amok on the Chinese mainland.
In this sense, this is the People's Liberation Army, under the city of Taiyuan in the eastern battlefield, firing the last shot against the Japanese.
3. Epilogue: The Haunting Ghost over Asia
We live today 75 years after the victory of the war, 48 years since the restoration of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations, and 29 years since the end of the Cold War era. But this does not mean that the Japanese who committed crimes in World War II were swept into the garbage heap, on the contrary, they were wrapped up in the tide of the times and integrated into the 75 years of post-war history in various guises.
After Chiang Kai-shek's defeat in Taiwan, he pinned his hopes on some Japanese officers, and he opened a "Yuanshan Officer Training Corps of the Revolutionary Practice Research Institute" in Yuanshan, Taipei, with more than 70 Japanese soldiers as instructors, and trained a total of 4,696 officers at all levels of the Nationalist Army between 1950 and 1952.
This group of Japanese instructors was recruited by Okamura Ninji, led by Naoori Tomita, the former chief of staff of the 23rd Army, who was pseudonymized as "Bai Hongliang", referred to as "White Regiment". These Japanese also secretly participated in the deduction and formulation of Chiang Kai-shek's "counter-offensive to the mainland" plan, and it can be said that on a hypothetical level, they engaged in another round of air-to-air competition with the People's Liberation Army.
For South Korea, almost all of its founding national defense families came from the puppet army units of the Japanese occupation era, and the military strongman Park Chung-hee, who led the south Korean economy to take off, studied at the puppet Manchukuo Military Academy and the Japanese Army Non-Commissioned Officer School as a Japanese Korean who was "Masao Takagi" when he was young, and fought against the anti-Japanese forces in puppet Manchukuo after graduation.
After Japan's defeat, he fled back to Japan to join the Korean Army, and then rose all the way to the rank of major general, and in 1961 he staged a military coup to rewrite the history of South Korea.
▲Chiang Kai-shek and members of the White Regiment
In the Malay Archipelago, where the Japanese had once ravaged, two strange stories broke out in 1974. On March 10, 1974, a 52-year-old Japanese veteran named Onoda Hiroshi officially accepted the armistice surrender order read in person by the elderly governor Yoshimi Taniguchi on the island of Lubang in the Philippines, ending his 29-year career of stubborn resistance in the mountains.
He and several other companions who had long since surrendered or died reportedly caused up to 130 casualties on the ground over decades. Coincidentally, nine months later, on December 29, the Indonesian government also found a 54-year-old Japanese veteran Nakamura on its own island of Morotai, making him reappear after nearly 30 years of hiding from the "enemy".
The news that Japanese veterans have not surrendered for thirty years is already amazing, but what is even more mixed is the final destination of their lives. Hiroshi Onoda, who has committed many murders, was pardoned by the President of the Philippines under the mediation of the Japanese government, and returned to his homeland as an "indomitable hero" to become the "spokesperson for the Showa Spirit" that the media rushed to report, and lived until January 16, 2014, when he died of pneumonia at the age of 91.
As for the innocent lives who died at his gunpoint, no one would care.
▲Hiroshi Onoda after the surrender
Reading the history so far, I can't help but sigh.