On the night of August 8, 1945, on the eve of the imminent total victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan, Yan'an, the "red capital" of the anti-Japanese base area, received two earth-shattering news, one of which was that the Red Army of the Soviet Union had dispatched 1.5 million troops on the same day to begin attacking the Japanese Kwantung Army entrenched in the northeast; and the other was that the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The next afternoon, Mao Zedong, who was busy deploying the great counteroffensive of Japan in the liberated areas, rarely sat down to smoke a cigarette and rest after his intense work, and picked up a copy of the "Liberation Daily" published that day to read, but when he looked at it, his face changed and he immediately became angry.
(Bogu in the Yan'an period)
(1) Mao Zedong's phone call was directed to President Bogu.
In fact, the Soviet government officially declared war on Japan in the early morning of August 8, and the first U.S. nuclear attack on Japan was on August 6, but don't forget, after all, it was an era when there was no network information that was not developed enough, so accurate information about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, including some technical details, was learned by Yan'an a little later. Today, we all have a relatively comprehensive understanding of the atomic bomb, but at that time, most people did not have an accurate understanding of nuclear weapons, and it was even more difficult to describe and introduce.
What caught Mao's attention on August 9 was actually a front-page headline in the Central Organ Newspaper Liberation Daily, titled": "Revolution in War Technology, Atomic Bomb Strikes enemy Hiroshima for the first time."
And the newsletter also added a subtitle: "Tokyo admits that all creatures were burned to death, and Hiroshima was filled with fireworks, up to 40,000 feet high." Obviously, this is the editors and reporters of the Liberation Daily, who want to spread this great good news throughout Yan'an and the anti-Japanese base areas as soon as possible. However, the writing method and the title of the article are very much the way of the "title party" on the Internet, and the lack of in-depth consideration in politics naturally caused Mao Zedong's displeasure, and he immediately called the "Liberation Daily" office and named comrade Bogu, the president.
(2) The founding process of Bogu and Jiefang Daily.
Bogu' original name was Qin Bangxian, of course, a very famous figure in the history of the Party, a native of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, graduated from Shanghai University and Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, was one of the "twenty-eight and a half Bolsheviks" who stayed in the Soviet Union, and soon after returning to China in 1930, he served as the secretary of the Communist Youth League and insisted on underground struggle in Shanghai. Due to Gu Shunzhang's rebellion, the Shanghai underground organization was seriously damaged by the enemy, and acting secretary Wang Ming appointed the 24-year-old Bogu as the temporary general manager of the Central Committee before withdrawing to the Soviet Union in 1931, and in 1933 Bogu followed the central organs to withdraw to the Jiangxi Soviet District, becoming the supreme leader of the Party in the Soviet Union and a member of the "Supreme Three-Man Regiment" of the Red Army.
Because Bogu was young and did not understand military affairs, he completely handed over the combat command of the Red Army to the foreign adviser Li De, abandoned the Red Army's previous mobile and flexible tactics, and fought hard with the superior enemy army, and in the case of a gradually unfavorable situation, the Red Army was finally forced to leave the Fujian-Gansu Soviet region to start the Long March. At the Zunyi Conference in 1934, Bogu was relieved of his post as temporary general in charge of the Central Committee and served only as director of the political department of the field forces of the Red Army.
After the Long March arrived in northern Shaanxi, Bogu successively served as the director of the Central Organization Department and the organization director of the Southern Bureau of the Yangtze River Bureau, and after returning to Yan'an, the central government decided to establish a large central organ newspaper, Jiefang Daily, and at the same time stipulated that Xinhua News Agency and Jiefang Daily should be under the management of the editorial board headed by Bogu.
(Bogu in his youth)
(3) The important role of the Liberation Daily in the period of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression
The "Liberation Daily" is the first large-scale daily newspaper founded by our party in the anti-Japanese base areas behind enemy lines, and its founding purpose is to encourage the people of the whole country to resist Japan and attack all acts of surrender that undermine unity and resistance, so as to bring into play the great power of public opinion.
At the same time, the circular demanded: "All localities should pay attention to receiving broadcasts from Yan'an, and important articles, in addition to being reprinted in newspapers and periodicals, should be used as discussion and educational materials within the party, in schools, and in the armed forces, and should also promote newspaper receivers so that all localities can receive them for wide publicity, which is of the utmost importance." It can be seen that the chairman attached great importance to the propaganda position, and under the leadership and meticulous organization of Bogu, the Liberation Daily was launched in Yan'an on May 16, 1941, as scheduled, and when it was first founded, the "Liberation Daily" was four pages in lead print and two pages, and from September 16, 1941, it was expanded to four pages and published daily.
(iv) Bogu and his comrades are immersed in joy.
Although Bogu has made mistakes on the left and has been criticized, his revolutionary enthusiasm is still very high, and he has changed some of his previous shortcomings and dared to take responsibility when there are mistakes in his work. For example, in early 1943, Yang Shangkun telephoned Bogu to convey instructions: "More than a dozen articles and newsletters published by the Liberation Daily that have guiding significance for the production and construction of base areas behind enemy lines are wrong for the Xinhua News Agency not to broadcast them, and they should be supplemented and sent out as soon as possible. In this regard, the editor of the Xinhua News Agency wrote an inspection, handed it to Bogu and then transferred it to the central office, Bogu read it carefully, took out a pen and approved the words "This responsibility should be borne by me" in the back, and signed his name.
On this occasion, Bogu and the comrades of the newspaper did not realize that there was anything wrong with the news, so when Mao Zedong's phone call came, Bogu was immersed in the joy of the imminent victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan with the comrades of the newspaper, this year he was only 38 years old, full of bookish anger and enthusiasm, and everyone was celebrating and talking about it:
"The United States dropped the atomic bomb, enough for the devils to bear"!
"If the Soviet Union sends troops again, little Japan will soon be finished"!
The comrades in Yan'an were very young at the time, so everyone was only happy and did not think too much, and suddenly the phone rang, it was Mao Zedong who directly wanted to talk to Bogu, and the Bogu expression who took the microphone soon became nervous, because Mao Zedong's tone was obviously different from usual, after asking who arranged the layout, Mao Zedong immediately asked: "How did you do it, why did you put the news of the Us dropping the atomic bomb on the front page?"
The sentence that followed made Bogu's nerves tense even more: "This is a very political error of principle"!
(Soldiers of the Eighth Route Army)
(5) Newspaper editors are severely criticized for an hour.
Mao Zedong loudly informed: "Tell Yu Guangsheng and Chen Kehan to come to me tomorrow." The two were the deputy editor-in-chief of the "Liberation Daily," the other was the chief editor of the Xinhua News Agency, and he was also the responsible editor of the news; when they were ordered to come to the cave where Mao Zedong lived and worked in Zaoyuan the next day, they stood there and were bitterly criticized for more than an hour, and the chairman finally concluded: "Propaganda should focus on me, increase our own morale, destroy the prestige of others, and should not exaggerate the role of the atomic bomb." ”。
On the fourth day after the incident, when the chairman spoke at the meeting of yan'an cadres, he again made a public criticism of the news of the "Liberation Daily" on August 9, and he first expounded from a political height the purpose of the United States and Chiang Kai-shek's hype about the power of the atomic bomb: "The propaganda organs in the United States and Chongqing want to take two atomic bombs to sweep away the Chinese people's insistence on resisting the war and the political influence of the Soviet Red Army, but they cannot be swept away, it is not so easy, can the atomic bomb solve the war? No. The atomic bomb cannot bring Japan into surrender, there is only the atomic bomb and there is no people's struggle, the atomic bomb is empty"!
He then made sharp criticisms of the work of some comrades of the Liberation Daily, including, of course, Bogu: "Some of our comrades also believe that the atomic bomb is great, which is very wrong, and these comrades look at the problem as inferior to a British nobleman. There was a British lord named Mountbatten, who said that it was the greatest mistake to think that the atomic bomb could solve the war, and that our comrades were even more backward than Mountbatten, and that these comrades regarded the atomic bomb as a god. It is influenced by the bourgeoisie, from bourgeois newspapers and news agencies."
Bogu and the comrades of the newspaper have examined this, but they may not be very clear about the deep cause of Chairman Mao's anger.
(Yan'an Celebration of the Victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression)
(6) The real reason for Chairman Mao's thunderous anger.
Normally speaking, the Chinese, which has endured fourteen years of arduous resistance, and the good news that Japan has suffered heavy losses caused by the atomic bombing, will not hesitate to think that it is a great good thing, and ordinary soldiers and civilians will not hesitate to clap their hands and applaud, and some literati reporters will not hesitate to praise this. Why, then, was Chairman Mao so furious at the news of the Liberation Daily? The reason why a leader is a leader is different from ordinary people is that not only can we see the immediate benefits and gains, but we can see more long-term and profoundly through events.
Although the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki played a certain role in Japan's announcement of its unconditional surrender to the Potsdam Proclamation, what was the real purpose of dropping such a nuclear bomb that had never been seen by mankind when Japanese imperialism was at the end of its rope? What kind of impact did it have on the Chinese revolution? These are the questions that Chairman Mao pondered more.
In particular, the propaganda department of the Chongqing authorities is making full efforts to publicize the power of the atomic bomb, and there will be demons in the event of abnormalities, and the Chongqing authorities' practice is undoubtedly showing the strength of their bosses behind the scenes, which has aroused the chairman's worries and uneasiness.
(Bombing of Japan)
Japan never surrendered because of the atomic bomb
Many history buffs, like the young editors of Yan'an at the time, believe that Japan's announcement of surrender was due to the enormous power of the atomic bomb, which is a very wrong view of history. In fact, by May 1945, when fascist Germany surrendered unconditionally, the Japanese government and military department knew that the general trend was over, and that it was only a matter of time before Japan was defeated, not only because of the despair of the military situation, but also because of the collapse of the domestic economy and government finances, and the war of aggression that began in 1931 had completely dragged down this small island nation.
Militarily, the US military in the Pacific Theater has torn through Japan's so-called "absolute defense circle", and the next step will be to land on the Japanese mainland when troops are on Iwo Jima, Okinawa Islands, and other strategic points in Japan's coastal waters; in the Yunnan-Burma battlefield, the Japanese army is also defeated and retreated under the joint blows of the Chinese Expeditionary Force and the British Army, and a part of the Burmese Front army has fled into Thailand; in the Chinese battlefield, the 11th Army, which once penetrated deep into Guangxi, is being expelled from the Xiangxi border, and Wang Yaowu's front army has won a great victory in the Battle of Xiangxi, "the commander-in-chief of the Chinese dispatch army." Okamura was forced to order the main force to shrink toward the coast.
(Surrender of the Japanese army in Peiping)
The Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army under the leadership of our Party also began to carry out a major counteroffensive from the second half of 1944, and the Japanese-Kou North China Front had to abandon a large number of counties, towns, and strongholds and shrink into large cities, and the Eighth Route Army successively liberated many cities in Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, and Chahar. Therefore, the Japanese had already accepted the Potsdam Proclamation in July 1945, when the three countries of China, the United States, and Britain urged Japan to surrender, but they were still unwilling to "unconditional surrender" and tried to "end the war" through the final struggle and the mediation of the Soviet Union.
Economically, Japanese war historians also admitted after the war that by the beginning of 1945, the Japanese national economy had completely collapsed, and even Deng Baozhen, an economic expert in military unification, accurately foresaw this. The declassified Japanese archives show that Japan's national strength declined year by year after reaching its peak in 1938, and the comprehensive data show that if the economic index after the occupation of the three eastern provinces in 1931 was based on 100, it reached 180 in 1937 and 1938, and then went all the way down, to 150 in 1941 and 80 in 1944 when the Pacific War broke out.
As of August 1945, when Japan announced its surrender, the figure was only 40!
(Surrender of Ninji Okamura)
(viii) Americans do have ulterior motives.
Chairman Mao's judgment on the behind-the-scenes political considerations of the Americans using the atomic bomb at the time when Japan was about to collapse was very accurate, and the United States hastily dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just after the atomic bomb was successfully tested, although it had the intention of making a forced landing against Japan to reduce the serious casualties that the armed landing might bring, but the motive behind the scenes was deeper. On the one hand, it is to continue the "weapons test" with these two cities that were not seriously damaged by the bombing, and on the other hand, the important purpose is to carry out "nuclear deterrence" against the Soviet Union and other camps, so as to take advantage of the division of interests after the war.
In fact, there are also differences within the US military and political leadership on the question of whether to drop atomic bombs, and some people represented by Marshall have raised objections, believing that Japan's defeat in the war is imminent, and there is no need to do anything more, but on the contrary, it bears the burden of morality, while another part of the people represented by MacArthur support the launch as revenge for provoking war against Japan. President Truman, who finally made up his mind, was a civilian official, and he and his civilian staff had their own political considerations.
For example, the then US Secretary of State Berners was blunt about this, dropping atomic bombs on Japan in order to "make the Russians better negotiate in Europe."
As early as July 1945, at the Potsdam meeting between the heads of state of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union, the new US President Truman, who once seemed to have no intention but deliberately, quietly said to Stalin: We already have a very powerful weapon that can destroy a city at once. However, to Truman's great disappointment, Stalin was as calm as water at the time, did not react to the shocked expression, and did not seem to take it seriously at all, nor did he pay attention to it at all.
In fact, Stalin knew very well in his heart that Truman was engaged in nuclear blackmail in an attempt to gain a first-mover advantage in the political game after World War II, and as a mature and clever politician, Stalin's reaction at that time was remarkable, he could be called an old fox, and his expressionless face was deliberately done for Truman to see. But Stalin also realized that the United States could really grasp the technology of the atomic bomb, and the Soviet Union had to speed up the progress of the work, and gave urgent instructions after leaving the venue.
Therefore, the American side regarded the possession of the atomic bomb not only as a military weapon, but also as a political capital that threatened everywhere, and for the Eastern Camp, it was necessary to arouse sufficient vigilance, and Bogu and his young colleagues were not aware of these deep things at that time.
Chairman Mao's thesis that the atomic bomb was a "paper tiger."
After the United States dropped the atomic bomb in an attempt to "better negotiate with the Russians," why not in the future when the differences between the Kuomintang and the Communists are deflected? Therefore, from this moment in August 1945, Chairman Mao did not believe in this evil and dared to wage a resolute struggle against the United States and Chiang Kai-shek, and then put forward the thesis that the atomic bomb was nothing more than a "paper tiger." A series of historical facts, from the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea to the Zhenbao Island Incident, have proved that Chairman Mao's views on the atomic bomb during the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the criticism carried out within the Party as a result were extremely politically far-sighted.
For example, in the Sino-Soviet armed conflict in 1969, some people in the Soviet Union once clamored for the use of atomic bombs to solve the problem, but Mao Zedong was very calm after listening to the report, he said: "Isn't it necessary to fight a nuclear war?" The atomic bomb is very powerful, but the contemptible people are not afraid"! The older generation remembered the slogan of "digging deep holes and accumulating grain in large quantities."At that time, the whole country quickly entered the situation of "preparing for war", the national economy began to turn to a state of war, and a large number of military and civilian factories moved into mountainous areas and the third line, implementing the "mountain, scattered, and cave" configuration.
In the end, what about it, it is nothing more than a bluff nuclear blackmail by the Soviet side, "Little Huanyu, how many flies can there be"?
(Soviet troops sent to the northeast)
(10) Epilogue: Bogu's sacrifice.
Soon after the occurrence of this incident in the Jiefang Daily, Mao Zedong resolutely went to Chongqing for negotiations in September 1945, the Kuomintang and the Communists signed the "Double Tenth Agreement" and prepared to restart the Political Consultative Conference, and in February of the following year, Bogu was ordered to Chongqing to assist Zhou Gong in participating in the deliberation of the Constitutional Draft, serving as a member of the CCP Committee of the Constitutional Draft Subcommittee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. On April 8, 1946, Bogu, Wang Ruofei, Deng Fa, Ye Ting and 13 other people were killed in a plane crash when they returned to Yan'an from Chongqing on a plane crash, at the age of 39.
After Comrade Bogu was killed, various circles in Yan'an and the Chongqing CPC delegation held mourning activities, and Chairman Mao and other leaders of our party issued inscriptions or articles one after another to mourn the sacrificed comrades-in-arms and express their feelings of remembrance. Yu Guangsheng, editor-in-chief of Jiefang Ribao, Ai Siqi, deputy editor-in-chief, Chen Kehan, vice president of Xinhua News Agency, and other comrades co-wrote an article entitled "Mourning Our President and Comrade-in-Arms Comrade Bogu" and published it in Jiefang Ribao.
In their eulogy, they wrote: "For those of us who are engaged in the journalistic cause of the party and the people, we have lost one of the most authoritative commanders and closest comrades-in-arms."
(Soldiers of the Eighth Route Army on the eve of the victory of the War of Resistance)