"On Protracted War" is a military treatise written by the instructor in May 1938 to study and guide China's War of Resistance Against Japan, and was lectured at the Yan'an Anti-Japanese War Research Conference from May 26 to June 3 of the same year. At the same time, this article was also published in full on July 1, 1938 in the 43rd and 44th bound editions of the Yan'an Liberation Weekly Agency, and then flowed to the whole country and attracted the attention of people from all walks of life throughout the country.
"On Protracted War" is published publicly, and it is not a secret weapon. "On Protracted War" will not only be collected and seen by the intelligence personnel of the Japanese army, but at that time, we should not only try to keep it secret, but should find a way to make it widely circulated throughout the country, and if it can be widely circulated in the Japanese army, it will be more powerful.
"On Protracted War" actually answers three questions: whether to win, how to win, and when to win. The instructors used eloquent arguments to analyze and conclude that the War of Resistance Against Japan was bound to be a protracted war, and that the final victory belonged to China. Its wide circulation can not only inspire the confidence of the Chinese people in resisting the war, but also destroy the enemy's military heart, so for the Japanese army, protracted war is a kind of murderous conspiracy.
On August 23, 1938, "On Protracted War" was published in the Shanghai "Daily Translation" and "Herald", and in September it was published as a single edition under the name of "Translation Newspaper Series". The Japanese edition of "On Protracted War" was published in full in the October 1938 issue of Reform magazine, Japan's largest comprehensive magazine, in early September, and was translated by Masuda Shigeru. The English edition of "On Protracted War" was published in February 1939 by the Shanghai English newspaper Justice Review.
On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced his unconditional surrender by radio in the Edict of the End of the War, which meant that Japan ended as a loser in World War II. But in fact, there were many Japanese people at that time who were not convinced, and they thought that they had only lost to the United States and the Soviet Union, not China.
Former Japanese Army Air Force Lieutenant General Saburo Endo was one of them, but he later changed his mind because he read a book.
Saburo Endo, because his official position was not very high at that time, was not an eye-catching figure among many Japanese generals. But he played an important role in the Chinese battlefield many times, such as personally leading a raid on Chiang Kai-shek's official residence in August 1940, when the bomb exploded a few meters away from Chiang Kai-shek, which frightened a group of senior nationalist generals.
What made Endo Saburo famous was the later Battle of Yichang. In October 1941, the Nationalist general Chen Cheng led 15 divisions to besiege Yichang, when the commander of the Japanese 13th Division "stationed" in Yichang, Uchiyama Hidetaro, could not resist and was ready to surrender, Endo Saburo knew that after flying alone in a light bomber to Yichang to direct the battle, and then broke through the encirclement of the Nationalist army to move the rescue troops, and finally relied on his own indiscriminate bombing to "save" Yichang.
Four years later, Japan surrendered, Endo Saburo as a war criminal was imprisoned for a year, after being released from prison was sent to Saitama Prefecture to engage in farmland farming, but Endo Saburo, who had returned to the deep forest, still stubbornly believed that There was no problem with Japan's previous strategy of "breaking through in the middle and flying with both wings", or even perfect, and the final failure was caused by the failure of the two wings of the United States and the Soviet Union, rather than defeat at the hands of China, and he believed that the Chinese battlefield had almost completed the breakthrough.
It was only later, when Saburo Endo read Chairman Mao's book "On Protracted War," that he changed the idea he had always insisted on.
Saburo Endo finally understood that the Chinese army's operational philosophy of "accumulating small victories into big victories and exchanging space for time" was that the Communist Party of China, with the fundamental interests of the masses of the people as the core, extensively mobilized the common people, causing Japan to fall into the ocean of Chinese-people's war and unable to extricate itself, thus leading to Japan's defeat.
What is surprising is that after reading this book, Saburo Endo disappeared from his former militaristic ideas and took the initiative to become a Sino-Japanese friendly ambassador of peace. In 1956, Saburo Endo visited China, was received by Chairman Mao, and handed over the Japanese samurai sword passed down from his family to Chairman Mao, indicating that Japanese soldiers would never fight with China again. Chairman Mao returned a painting by Qi Baishi (aaaah, Qi Baishi's painting 欸), and said that Japan had educated the Chinese people, so that the Chinese people, who were originally scattered, quickly united.
After visiting China, Saburo Endo founded the Sino-Japanese Friendship Soldiers Association, and wrote his own observations and studies of China in the war into books such as "What Old Soldiers Saw and The Communist Party of China" and "The Fifteen-Year War between Japan and China and Me", in which he also boldly exposed the various crimes of the Japanese army, including the infamous 731 Unit and the endless bacteriological warfare.