Chapter 16 Chapter 16 Japan in Trouble

To reward the Kuomintang and the Communist Party for a honeymoon, Moscow's propaganda army adopted a new stance of flattery.Chiang Kai-shek is no longer a "fascist" and a "reactionary", but now a "hero", a "great leader". People abroad who hope for China's victory and those who support Chiang Kai-shek at home are very surprised why they don't take advantage of the victory and turn to attack.But Chiang Kai-shek's strategy was to retreat to the interior and stand still. Unwilling to risk the Eighth Route Army's extinction, Mao Zedong flatly rejected Stalin's request for the Chinese Communist Party to strike at additional Japanese troops in northern China.

People in Chongqing still remember that Chongqing was the wartime capital of China at that time, but now it has become an ordinary city. Chongqing, unchanged until China's rout in 1938, was a commercial port in Sichuan through which the province's rich produce was shipped.It is located at the confluence of the Yangtze River and the Jialing River, connecting the Central Plains with the towering Himalayas. In 1938, thousands of refugees flooded into Chongqing, making its population soar from 200,000 to 1 million. These newcomers included government officials, businessmen, financiers, servants, and various others, and they stayed for six years, during which time they, along with the locals, learned how to endure Chongqing's cold, wet winters, sweltering heat The unbearably hot summer and the stench from the open gutters.

Beijingers, Nanjingers, Shanghainese and Cantonese came in droves, while Sichuanese were in the minority.In the end, Japan was defeated, and these people from other provinces left one after another, and Chongqing became the former remote city with no human resources. Among these newcomers, two to three hundred thousand were poor, and they all crowded within the walls of the old city.And those who were rich, less poor, or more able, built houses or villas of varying degrees of luxury on the hillsides around the city.Among them, the most magnificent one is located in Huangshan Mountain by the Yangtze River; it is the residence of the Chairman and Mrs. Jiang.

Of course, the chairman also has a residence in the city in the headquarters compound.Later, he built a group of villas on the other side of the city as a place for him to entertain state guests. On December 28, 1938, U.S. Army Attaché Joseph W. Stilwell visited the Chiang family at their city residence.It was a very brief meeting, lasting only fifteen minutes, and the attitude was very sincere, in stark contrast to the violent quarrel between them later.As early as in the last few days in Hankou, Stilwell met Mrs. Chiang, and the two hit it off very well, and they both left a deep impression on each other.But this time in Chongqing, it was the first time for Stilwell to meet the chairman of the committee.

Despite the pleasant atmosphere of the meeting, Stilwell was not impressed by the Chinese leader, a view he expressed in a report he wrote a month later. He held Chiang Kai-shek directly responsible for the ongoing confusion in his command.He also criticized Chiang Kai-shek's distrust of his subordinates, and believed that this was because Chiang Kai-shek wanted to monopolize power in case his status was threatened. Stilwell was a shrewd and difficult professional soldier who knew China and knew Chinese.He had no admiration for dignitaries and was a man of few words, but not out of strategy.His nickname "Prickly Head" can reflect his character very well.

When I first met Chiang Kai-shek, his mission was almost over, and the quarrels between them occurred later in the course of the war. During the first months of 1939, the Japanese were no longer Chiang Kai-shek's greatest worries.Instead, two domestic issues took center stage: Wang Ching-wei and the Communist Party. In January, the chairman sent Wang Luqiao to Hanoi to follow Wang Jingwei, a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the police academy in Chiang Kai-shek's native Zhejiang province.His mission was to assassinate Wang Jingwei.He found his target, but missed, knocking down a friend of Wang Jingwei.Later, he followed from Hanoi to Shanghai, but failed.In exchange for his hard work, he was imprisoned by France for six years.

The Communist Party is a more painful issue for Chiang Kai-shek.Under the "United Front" policy, the Communist Party won a certain number of seats in the 200-member National Political Council, the top wartime decision-making body established by Chiang Kai-shek in April 1938. First in Hankou and later in Chongqing, the Communist Party had a permanent delegation headed by Zhou Enlai.The director of the Political Department of the Military Commission was General Zhang Zhizhong, and the deputy director was Zhou Enlai, so the Political Department employed many intellectuals from left-wing parties.Guo Moruo (later president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing) was the head of the Third Department of the Political Department, which exercised overall control over the creation, staging, and production of theatrical films.A professor at Peking University surnamed Zhang, a German philosopher who sympathized with Marxists, served as the editor-in-chief of the "Wartime Culture Monthly", an official publication of the Political Department.Eric Zhou worked under Zhang as deputy editor for seven months from December 1938.According to him, Zhang had a close relationship with Zhou Enlai and only hired people from the left (including Eric Zhou at the time)

Be an editor.Zhang was also an active representative in the National Suffrage Conference. At that time, some underground communists successfully broke into many important institutions of the Kuomintang.For example: Ji Chaoding works as a manager in the central bank and has won the trust of Kong Xiangxi.By 1949, he was the first governor of the People's Bank of China.There is also Wang Bingnan, who is in charge of organizational work in the Social Welfare Department, the stronghold of the CC regiment.Later, during the peace talks between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, he became Zhou Enlai's main spokesman, and later served as Beijing's ambassador to Warsaw. In the late 1950s, he had long-term discussions with American representatives on Taiwan's status and other controversial issues. negotiations.His German wife, Anna, was Sun Yat-sen's secretary, often with foreign journalists and Western diplomats, providing them with news or political rumors.

For a while, Chiang Kai-shek tolerated the Communists, and the Communists tolerated him, because failure to do so would affect Soviet aid to the central government. One of the rewards for this honeymoon is that Moscow's propaganda army has adopted a new stance of flattering the Generalissimo.He is no longer a "fascist" and a "reactionary", but now he has become a "hero" and a "great leader". A group of left-wing writers from various countries appeared in Chongqing to contribute to the establishment of this new image. The same people later turned against Chiang Kai-shek and created a diametrically opposed image of him that everyone hated, while at the same time making people believe that the Chinese Communist Party was only a moderate land reformer, not a real Communist Party.

In Hankou, there have been frictions. In the autumn of 1938, when Zhou Enlai reintroduced the previous practice of allowing dual membership of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, Chiang Kai-shek's original suspicion of the Communist Party's intentions was further aggravated.He immediately rejected Zhou Enlai's proposal, but (as we have also seen) he did not have the power to disband the Red Army and incorporate its soldiers into the national army in their individual capacities. The 20,000 Shaanxi Red Army under Zhu De and his assistant Peng Dehuai was transformed into the Eighth Route Army of the National Revolutionary Army in August 1937.Nominally, Zhu De's troops were under the command of General Yan Xishan in the northern province of Shanxi, but in reality the Eighth Route Army was under the orders of Mao Zedong.

In the spring of 1938, the scattered units of the Red Army south of the Yangtze River were allowed to reorganize into the New Fourth Army under Ye Ting, nominally under the command of Kuomintang General Gu Zhutong. According to the Communist Party's official history of the Patriotic War, the Eighth Route Army increased from 45,000 in 1937 to 400,000 in 1940, while the New Fourth Army increased from 15,000 to 100,000 in the same period.Here, the 1937 figures are not necessarily completely accurate, but there is no reason to doubt the greatly increased figures of 1940. Wherever the Communist Party went behind enemy lines, it vigorously organized the masses.In most places the peasants, who had been ravaged by the Japanese, were more than willing to join the Communist Party, and the Communist Party, in turn, took great care not to separate from the peasantry.By mobilizing the peasants, the Communist Party expanded its political influence. In May 1939, when the smog that had shrouded Chongqing during the cold season lifted, the Japanese began aerial bombardment of the city.The first air strike was on May 3, causing 5,000 casualties. The defenders had neither anti-aircraft guns nor shelter from air strikes.As soon as the air raid was over, Chiang Kai-shek and his wife showed up.As usual, Chiang Kai-shek reprimanded several commanders of his puny air force, accusing them of being incompetent. He ordered He Yingqin to be responsible for the evacuation of the masses, while he retired to the nearest mountain to quietly think about China's problems. The air raids continued throughout the summer, and in the spring of 1940 a larger bombing campaign began.At this time, people finally built enough air-raid shelters and shelters.The most heavily bombed year was 1941, and the longest interval between air raids was five hours.The shortest was only one and a half hours, just like London under the indiscriminate bombing of Germany, Chongqing suffered. In May 1930, the Japanese did another thing. They attacked the border of Outer Mongolia, which was protected by the Soviet Union, to test whether the Soviet Union was determined to join the war. In response, the Russians responded fiercely.General Zhukov, who stayed in China doing nothing, was in a panic. On August 20, he led the Russians and Mongols to attack and severely damaged the Japanese army.Now Tokyo has the answer it wants to know. But what happened just three days later shocked the Japanese and the world alike: the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. Now, not only did Japan know that the Soviets would fight back if attacked, but they also knew that they could not count on the Germans, that there would be no coordinated strategy, despite an anti-Third International pact.What made the Japanese especially sad was that they were negotiating an alliance with the Germans against the Soviet Union.As a result, the meeting was quickly broken off. From September onwards, the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army expanded to Shaanxi in the north.Hebei, Shandong, and Jiangsu and Anhui in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. On August 28, 1939, the leader of the Indian National Congress, P.J. Nehru, met with the Chiang Kai-shek couple at Chiang Kai-shek’s villa. The three talked for several hours amidst the sound of Japanese air raids. From then until the end of the year, Chiang Kai-shek's forces lost Changsha, later regained it, and drove the Japanese out of Guangxi in a single battle.During this period, the Kunlun Pass in southern China changed hands several times, and finally returned to Chinese control in the decisive battle on December 31. At this time, those who hoped for China's victory abroad and those who supported Chiang Kai-shek at home wondered why they did not take advantage of the victory and turn to attack. Later, this passive approach greatly annoyed Stilwell.But Chiang Kai-shek's strategy was to withdraw to the interior and stand still.He had achieved his wish to defeat the Japanese spirit.He has no plan to win, he just wants to survive, just to outlast the enemy in terms of staying power. He guessed that the Americans would be drawn into this war sooner or later, and by that time, he would be a meritorious minister who contained more than one million Japanese troops.Maybe even the Soviets would get involved in this war.So far, the Chinese have done Stalin a great favor by diverting large Japanese forces that threatened the Soviet Union.Under such circumstances, why did Chiang Kai-shek try his best in the military to consume little by little the strength he would use to deal with the Communist Party in the future? Chiang Kai-shek's stubbornness would be shown again in his later defeats. While he sat and waited for the Japanese to attack, the Communists pushed deeper into the Japanese rear.They don't fight every fight, but they do enough to feel like they've moved to the offense.From time to time the Japanese retaliated wildly, they burned villages, they committed all sorts of atrocities. But after each retaliation, the Communist Party has grown stronger, and people's expectations of them have grown.While in Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek was either sitting on the sidelines or pacing back and forth uneasily, always stubborn. He didn't see that his way of staying still was opening up a road to his downfall. Even after the war had broken out, Chiang Kai-shek could not completely get rid of the situation of local warlords. General Chen Xiaowei, a military historian, talked about this with Eric Chow in Hong Kong in 1957.He said that Chiang Kai-shek divided the entire battlefield into several independent theaters, the purpose of which was to establish independent combat units, allowing each unit to resist the attacking Japanese on its own.Thus, the deeper the Japanese pushed inland, the more resistance they encountered in the theater of operations they passed. The weakness of this plan is that the commanders in the various theaters did not follow the expectations.The troops of the provinces fought well in the defense of their homeland, but they were not prepared to fight the Japanese invaders far from their own provinces.This alone was enough to prevent the national army from turning to the offensive, even if Chiang Kai-shek was willing to use the equipment under his direct control and the better trained central army for the offensive rather than the defensive. In general, the KMT's army was no match for the Communists in guerrilla warfare. Chiang Kai-shek once opened a school for training guerrillas in the Hengshan area of ​​Hunan Province for the purpose of harassing the Japanese army from the rear. Feng Yuxiang came to this area and saw 5,000 young and strong villagers being trained in guerrilla warfare under the governor.However, their enthusiasm cannot make up for the lack of training.The training time is too short and the actual combat training is not enough.Therefore, General Feng predicted that these guerrillas would not have much effect. This remark really hit the mark. The KMT's more ambitious guerrilla plans were in Hebei province.On Feng Yuxiang's recommendation, the chairman appointed Lu Zhonglin as governor of Hebei Province and commander-in-chief of Hebei and Chahar.At that time, the Hebei provincial government had retreated to Luoyang.Lu Zhonglin set off from Luoyang, crossed the Yellow River, and headed north. When he arrived in Hebei, he summoned 300,000 to 400,000 militiamen with long guns.Lead them to harass the Japanese and inflict heavy damage on the enemy. However, Chiang Kai-shek spent less than six yuan a month on each of them, and a simple meal at that time was no less than one hundred yuan. (Original text.——Translator) Despite patriotism, six yuan a month is not enough to survive.As a result, this plan ended in failure. But there was one place where the Nationalist guerrillas did become a force to be reckoned with, and that was in northwestern Shansi province, an area that was extremely attractive to the Japanese because of its coal and other minerals. At the beginning of the war, the Japanese occupied Taiyuan, the capital of the province, and controlled the railway, but they failed to defeat the guerrillas on the mountain. Throughout the war, these guerrillas could come down the mountain at almost any time and severely damage the Japanese army.They clamped down a total of 500,000 Japanese troops. In the first months of 1940, the most shocking news was not military but political: Wang Jingwei had become a complete Japanese puppet. When he fled to Hanoi in late 1938, Chiang's only public reaction was to issue a statement on January 7, 1939, stating that he and Wang Ching-wei had not previously discussed making peace with Japan (which was not the case). After many years, someone asked Holrington Tang to come forward and say that Chiang Kai-shek was trying to leave a way for Wang Jingwei to reconsider his actions. We have seen that Chiang Kai-shek actually sent assassins to assassinate Wang Jingwei.When it became clear that the assassins were unlikely to succeed, Chiang Kai-shek's government issued an order on June 8, 1939, to arrest and punish Wang Jingwei. On July 9, Wang Jingwei accused Chiang Kai-shek of "helping the red elements" and leading China to its demise.He then declared himself the leader of the "orthodox Chinese Nationalist Party."This pseudo-KMT held a "Sixth National Congress", at which Wang Jingwei was elected "Chairman". By the end of January 1940, Japanese Prime Minister Mitsudai Yonei made another "peaceful" proposal.He alluded to Wang Jingwei's formation of a new government in which "even General Chiang Kai-shek" and other officials in Chongqing would be acceptable.A month later, it was reported that Wang Jingwei's "government" had signed an "eight-point agreement" with Japan. The culmination of all these actions came on March 30, 1940, when Wang Jingwei's "government" was formally proclaimed in Nanking.The whole process was like a strange farce.Not only did Wang Jingwei refer to his own party as the "Kuomintang" and copied all the slogans of the Kuomintang, but he also used the flag designed by Sun Yat-sen with "blue sky, white sun, and red ground". are the same flag. Wang Jingwei's "government" even recruited an army, and they gave the captured "soldiers" two choices: either join the army or be shot.Not surprisingly, many of this army deserted. In September 1941, in northern Henan, 30,000 of Wang Jingwei's soldiers killed their Japanese officers and passed over to Chiang Kai-shek. Japan waited until November 30 to recognize its puppet regime, "Manchukuo" Also followed to admit. On July 1, 1941, Germany and Italy, as well as the Axis satellite countries Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia, successively recognized the puppet regime of Wang.Spain has done the same. In Chongqing, Chiang Kai-shek responded to the news by court-martialing and executing one of Wang Jingwei's accomplices, Shi Yousan; Chiang's secret police arrested 155 people believed to be covert supporters of Wang Jingwei. The traditional view obviously regards Wang Jingwei as a typical traitor and puppet, a traitor. But all of this is actually much more complicated than wartime ones see it.Wang Jingwei was one of Sun Yat-sen's closest students.In the power struggle, he was defeated by Chiang Kai-shek and was marginalized.However, his personal vendetta with Chiang Kai-shek cannot be the only explanation for what he did during the War of Resistance Against Japan. According to Chen Gongbo, he had doubts about the resistance to Japan in 1932.Before that, he supported the resistance, but the Battle of Gubeikou on the Great Wall disappointed him very much.From the surviving Chinese generals, he learned that the soldiers could not stand against the Japanese because their weapons were far behind the enemy's.This incident made Wang Jingwei believe that peace is better than resistance. In 1946, Hu Lin, one of the founders of Ta Kung Pao, told Eric Zhou that Wang Jingwei had become a staunch anti-Communist after his trip to Europe in 1932. From then on, in private conversations, he often blamed himself for having led the left wing of the Kuomintang.He believed that Europe was more worried about communism than about fascism.He sees "genuine Sino-Japanese cooperation" as a stabilizing factor in Asia. However, for fear of splitting the Kuomintang, he kept these ideas public until 1935.At that time, he established a "low-key club" in Nanjing to spread his ideas of making peace with Japan to people in the political, business and cultural circles. Subsequently, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China.It must be admitted that compared with Pétain and Laval after the fall of France, there are not so many justifications for Wang Jingwei's actions, because China has not yet been defeated. Nonetheless, Wang Ching-wei appears to have been fully convinced that China could not prevail against the might of Japanese force, and that peace talks in 1939 or 1940 would yield looser terms than the peace imposed after total defeat. On January 16, 1938, the Konoe Cabinet of Japan issued a statement saying that the Japanese government would refuse to deal with the Chinese National Government represented by Chiang Kai-shek in the future. For Wang Jingwei and those who agreed with him, this statement made peace talks possible. Totally shattered". If the Japanese couldn't overthrow Chiang Kai-shek and didn't deal with him, the prospect would be endless war. The only solution seemed to be to replace Chiang Kai-shek with another government leader, someone with a record and reputation who would please the Japanese.Only Wang Jingwei himself met these conditions. at first.The Japanese themselves chose Wu Peifu, a veteran warlord, as their puppet. But he contemptuously rejected the Japanese overtures, which had suggested to Wang Ching-wei that they were prepared to withdraw their troops from China within two years of the end of hostilities. But once he "takes office," the Japanese are simply reluctant to make such commitments. Facts have proved that Chiang Kai-shek was right to choose resistance. For Chiang Kai-shek and China, 1940 was from beginning to end a year of great political significance. The catastrophe of war in Western Europe had adverse consequences for China.Taking advantage of the fall of France, Japan sent an ultimatum to France to close the railway from Hanoi to China.After the British withdrew from Dunkirk, they were also seriously injured and fell into isolation. Taking advantage of Britain's plight, Japan demanded that Britain immediately close the Hong Kong border and the Burma road.Otherwise, war will be threatened.Winston Churchill turns to President Roosevelt in desperation: If war comes, will America help Britain against Japan?However, America itself was weak at the time.Moreover, Roosevelt saw it as politically inconceivable to involve his country in a war to save the fortunes of the British Empire, which on July 12 closed the Burma Road.What comforted their conscience a little was that they added an additional condition, that is, the closure was only for three months, giving China and Japan another chance to resolve the issue peacefully. For the chairman and his government, this was the biggest blow; because at that time, the Burma Highway was the only way for China to communicate with the outside world. Chiang Kai-shek issued a statement formally accusing the British decision of violating the existing Sino-British treaty. However, China can't do much more about it because they are in the same position as the UK, fighting alone against a vicious enemy with no allies.In Japan, Konoe returned as prime minister after the collapse of Mitsumi's cabinet this month.In order to keep his promise, he kept his promise to Britain, and indeed made another "peaceful" proposal.This time, Japan proposed to grant special status to the five northern provinces of Chahar, Suiyuan, Hebei, Shanxi, and Shandong, and to recognize the Wang Jingwei regime, delaying the decision on the future status of "Manchukuo".As usual, Chiang Kai-shek ignored this. On October 12, seeing that peace efforts in China were ineffective, the British opened the Burma Road again. In Chiang Kai-shek's view, the British changed the original cruel decision, which meant that they fundamentally reaffirmed China's status. So far, he has firmly believed that the conflict between Japan and the United States is not only inevitable, but will soon appear. . Therefore, he declared that China fully stood with Britain and the United States against the aggression of the Axis powers.In this way, even if Japan puts forward very decent conditions, the national government will refuse to negotiate.These decisions were announced in November 1940, and there was not a single dissent among Chiang Kai-shek's generals and advisers. Another major blow to Chiang Kai-shek during the Anti-Japanese War came from an unexpected place. On April 13, 1941, the Soviet Union unexpectedly signed a five-year neutrality treaty with Japan.In Chiang Kai-shek's view, Stalin's erratic policies were unbelievable.Stalin has been supplying China with munitions to deal with the Japanese. But now, the Russians are cynically disregarding the Sino-Soviet agreement of 1924 and the Sino-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1937, so that the Japanese will not be threatened by the Soviet Union's military actions in their Asian regions, allowing them to let go. Do whatever you want in China. The blow was all the more severe for Chiang Kai-shek because only two days earlier, on April 11, 1941, the Soviet ambassador to China had assured the Chinese government that Russia would never sacrifice a friendly country for selfish reasons Interests. In the last month, Chinese people have been paying close attention to Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka's visit to Moscow after his visit to Germany.However, the ambassador said that the Soviet government gave Matsuoka Yosuke nothing more than ordinary diplomatic courtesy.In the new treaty signed by the Soviet Union and Japan, Japan recognized the Republic of Outer Mongolia under the protection of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union recognized "Manchuria". Many years later, Chiang Kai-shek mentioned this in his book "Soviet Russia in China": The neutrality agreement of April 1941 was only a small part of a larger Russian-Japanese conspiracy in which Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and the Tongguan Pass in Shaanxi Province were all to be assigned to the Soviet Union. Never before has Chiang Kai-shek needed America's help. At the farewell dinner of U.S. Ambassador Nelson T. Johnson on May 10, 1941, the Chairman made a provocative compliment to the United States, saying: "I firmly believe that any country in the world that dares to make an enemy of the United States, a democratic country, will surely be destroyed." Stalin's "neutrality" pact with Japan was beneficial to the Soviet Union both politically and strategically: it was a supplement to the agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.The Soviet-German pact initially drove a wedge between the two anti-communist partners, and now the Soviet-Japanese pact further gives the Soviet Union a certain guarantee of inviolability on its threatened frontier. However, this agreement did not protect the Soviet Union any more than the agreement with Hitler failed to prevent Hitler from invading the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. As Hitler's troops marched on Moscow, Stalin called on the Chinese Communists to strike at the new Japanese forces in northern China.According to his considerations, this containment would allow him to withdraw Soviet troops on the eastern frontier to his European area for defensive purposes.But Mao Zedong, unwilling to risk the destruction of his Eighth Route Army, flatly rejected the request. In September, the Russians had no choice but to transfer the Far Eastern Army to the European front, and only then did Zhukov stop the Nazi attack on the outskirts of the capital. However, Japan at this time did not intend to invade the Far East of the Soviet Union.Instead, their plan was to hit the US Navy and sweep across Southeast Asia.The problem is that the "China incident" has been dragging on for more than four years and still holds back the large Japanese forces. In this way, in September 1941, Tokyo made another attempt to "negotiate peace".This time, they hinted that they would accept a compromise between Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai-shek.But Chiang Kai-shek still refused to associate with them. The chairman found the attitude of the United States elusive. In the summer of 1940, the U.S. government stopped exports of steel scrap to several countries, including Japan.If Japan attacks the United States, there is no doubt that China will receive the full assistance of the United States. But which China? In February 1941, President Roosevelt had his executive aide, Laughlin Curry, deliver a disturbing message to Chiang Kai-shek.Currie had no fewer than ten meetings with the Chairman.During the first meeting, Currie conveyed Roosevelt's message to the effect that in his eyes the Chinese Communist Party looked more like socialists, so of course the goal should be cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. Currie wanted to meet with Zhou Enlai, which the Chairman had no objection to, but when it came to what the Chinese Communists were doing and their relationship with the Third International, Chiang Kai-shek severely rebuked the presidential envoy.In Chiang Kai-shek's view.False information about the Chinese Communist Party has been reaching President Roosevelt for some time. As 1941 wore on, President Roosevelt's confrontation with the Japanese grew stronger. In July, he froze Japanese assets in the United States. In August, he warned Japan that if they further pursued a policy of military occupation of Asia, they would force the United States to "immediately take all possible measures" to protect American rights and interests. On October 17, Konoe stepped down and was replaced by the militaristic leader Hideki Tojo. Subsequently, Japan and the United States conducted fruitless negotiations in Washington. On December 7, without warning, the Japanese bombed the American fleet in Hawaii and the British forces in Hong Kong and Malaya.On this day, the United States lost 5 battleships, 3 cruisers and 177 aircraft at Pearl Harbor.There were 2343 dead, 876 missing and 1272 injured. The next day, the United States and Great Britain declared war on Japan, and China declared war on Germany and Italy. In his telegram to President Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek said: "In our new common battle, we will do our best to stand with you until the Pacific region and the world are freed from the scourge of barbaric forces and endless betrayal. .” So far, the "China Incident" has entered World War II.