Podcasts about nationalists

When candidates cosplay as football fans and QBs become a passport to the hearts and wallets of vulnerable Americans, the wrong people can get rich and powerful off sports. Electrician turned independent journalist D.J. Byrnes has pranked Buckeyes "fan" Vivek Ramaswamy, caught Urban Meyer in a lap-dance scandal and will go to trial over Shrek's private parts in the name of free speech. But nothing shocked Ohio's muckraker-in-chief quite like watching a college-football powerhouse combine the enterprises of church and state.• Subscribe to D.J. Byrnes' Substack, "The Rooster"• Leak to us: Submit your confidential tips to Pablo• Previously on PTFO: We Investigated the Christian "Scam" Fronted by Tim Tebow(Pablo Torre Finds Out is brought to you by Apple Card.)(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

J.D. Greear recently published “Why I’m Not a Christian Nationalist,” arguing for a particular understanding of religious liberty, government, and the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. On this episode of The Magistrate, Josh Howard is joined by George Sayour to respond.Is civil government actually capable of moral neutrality?Should nations recognize the Lordship of Christ?And how should Christians distinguish religious liberty from the idea that government can operate without reference to an ultimate standard of justice?Josh and George interact with Greear’s arguments while drawing from historic Protestant political theology, Romans 13, the Ten Commandments, the Great Commission, and the Lordship of Christ.They also address Andrew Walker’s recent contribution to the discussion and consider how Christians can reject both political idolatry and political retreat.

Speaking at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a sweeping outline detailing the administration's vision for the future of the U.S. armed forces. In a speech flanked by junior officers and non-commissioned officers, Hegseth laid out plans for a fundamental restructuring of the Department of Defense - a transition marked by significant ideological shifts, the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and the confirmation of plans to eliminate 20% of America's top military general officers and admirals. At the center of this transformation is Project Meridian, a new 120-day government study commissioned to map out technological dominance across next-generation operational domains - including artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, subterranean warfare, and lunar security. Independent media has never been more important. Please support this channel by subscribing here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkbwLFZhawBqK2b9gW08z3g?sub_confirmation=1 Join this channel with a membership for exclusive early access and bonus content: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkbwLFZhawBqK2b9gW08z3g/join Five Minute News is a MeidasTouch Podcast, covering politics, inequality, health and climate - delivering independent, unbiased and essential news for the US and across the world. Follow us on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/fiveminutenews.bsky.social Follow us on Instagram http://instagram.com/fiveminnews Support us on Patreon http://www.patreon.com/fiveminutenews Support Anthony on Substack https://theanthonydavis.substack.com You can subscribe to Five Minute News with your preferred podcast app, ask your smart speaker, or enable Five Minute News as your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing skill. CONTENT DISCLAIMER The views and opinions expressed on this channel are those of the guests and authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The MeidasTouch Network, Anthony Davis or Five Minute News LLC. Any content provided by our hosts, guests or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything, in line with the First Amendment right to free and protected speech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

J.D. Greear recently published “Why I'm Not a Christian Nationalist,” arguing for a particular understanding of religious liberty, government, and the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. On this episode of The Magistrate, Josh Howard is joined by George Sayour to respond.Is civil government actually capable of moral neutrality?Should nations recognize the Lordship of Christ?And how should Christians distinguish religious liberty from the idea that government can operate without reference to an ultimate standard of justice?Josh and George interact with Greear's arguments while drawing from historic Protestant political theology, Romans 13, the Ten Commandments, the Great Commission, and the Lordship of Christ.They also address Andrew Walker's recent contribution to the discussion and consider how Christians can reject both political idolatry and political retreat.Watch all of our videos and subscribe to our channel for the latest content >HereHere

Recorded from Sept25th-Sept30th-good open mic experience-mental illness during Fall & Winter-cigarette breath-horoscopes-normalized anti women sentiment-Hanzi isms in the podcast-wondering how I survived this long-lying in my past-recent local comedy specials-not letting internet dictate comedy-Howard Stern formula-Weird dreams-Chrisean Rock-Beef genre passed down to streamers-Converse-Shaq FBI-food critics-trans athletes-Ed Sheeran/Macklemore-grifters off plight-Forced Hasan discourse-America First “leftists”-political kayfabe-Lupe/Obama 911 conspiracies-Lauren Boebert rumors-gimmicked sports characters-Kamala/Abdul-Trump TV-Nolan Wells-Clavicular-Ana Kasparian-Chris D'Elia college campuses-uncharismatic streamers-gimmicked discourse-Janel Grant-Nikkita Hand-Simone Johnson-NPH-Vince Russo-TK praising David Ellison-Busted Open-Last week Raw and Dynamite recaps-Steve Borden concussion-All Out last week Smackdown TNA NXT recaps-RIP PAC & Dennis Haskins-not wanting to be here as discourse becomes worse-ppl hating me no matter what-making myself feel uncomfortable to make others comfortable-having a good time w JFL Toronto festivities-envisioned convos-working on Astrology material-another good open mic experience-reminded of L's taken-repeated behavior-influenced by Howard Stern self indulgence-radio caller history-New music-JBP Network sub reddit-Sidney Sweeney/Scooter Braun-Jay Z accuser recants-Cornell 7-streamers/Media-Kanye cameos-Drake image-Internet lack of understanding of comedy-WWE HOF-Roman Reigns-WWE on Rumble-Jaxon Ryker-Vince/TK-WWE vs AEW-Keanu Carver Trump media-Zohran/Trump-anti Israel sentiment-Evan Barker-conspiracies-Nationalist movement in BC-Recaps of this week's Raw and NXT

Following Joyriders, Ireland's Lucky Dip Gang on Virgin Media One, our panel examines mobile gang terror, the fallout from the M9 crash and what can be done about joy-riding teenagers.Plus, the Garvaghy Road standoff enters its third day as Nationalist residents and the Orange Order remain deadlocked in Drumcree. What will break the impasse?And Manchester City fans get the Blues as the Premier League champions are found guilty of all charges relating to alleged financial rule breaches.Presenter Shane Coleman was joined by:Barry Ward TD, Fine Gael Matt Carthy TD, Spokesperson on Justice, Sinn Féin Robert Cullen, Criminologist and Former Prisoner John Joe O'Connell Vice President, GRA Martina Devlin, Columnist and Novelist Claudia Savage, Ireland reporter for PA based in BelfastMiguel Delaney, Chief Football Writer at The Independent Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There is a stalemate in Portadown and deep division in Stormont.On the Orange side, the issue is the rights of a small number of people to march their traditional route – backed by a legal ruling. On the Garvaghy Road, a community feels that march is sectarian harassment - and a relic of another age. This is a local issue, but one which deep historical resonances, and one which many fear has brought Northern Ireland to the political brink.Unionists accuse nationalists of not accepting the rule of law, while nationalists accuse unionists of unnecessarily opening an old wound.Ciarán Dunbar is joined by Sam McBride and Allison Morris and hears from Claire Dickson in Portadown, and from Andrew Madden in Stormont. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Parades Commission has given go ahead for Drumcree Orange march down the Garvaghy Road - but with stringent conditions. Permission has been granted for no more than 35 people, including five named marshals, to take part in the parade, which will depart Drumcree Church at 8am on Sunday September 27. Nationalists are outraged by the decision; unionists have welcomed it. Ciarán Dunbar is joined by the Belfast Telegraph's security correspondent, Allison Morris. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jay joins Pavel in Powers and Principalities Part 2 and covers the nationalist proposition post enlightenment and the notion of a propositional state, as well as the paradigm issue as applied to political metaphysics. Superchats at any time here: https://streamlabs.com/jaydyer/tip Merch https://jaydyer-shop.fourthwall.com/collections/all Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnt7Iy8GlmdPwy_Tzyx93bA/join Support my work via Bitcoin here! bc1q07n9qqsvcx33yz6z8xj6meupqxxug9n55zzhqd Image Philosophy Course is here: https://marketplace.autonomyagora.com/philosophy101 Set up recurring Choq subscription with the discount code JAY60LIFE for 60% off now https://choq.com Subscribe to my site here: https://jaysanalysis.com/membership-account/membership-levels/ Music by Dr Evo the Producer, Jay Dyer and Amid the Ruins 1453 https://www.youtube.com/@amidtheruinsOVERHAULBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/jay-sanalysis--1423846/support.

Conor Murphy, Sinn Féin Senator & former Finance Minister in the Northern Assembly.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, Walter and Jeremy discuss the Flock camera debate, Canada's prospects for joining the EU, America's weaponization of outer space, and why geopolitical competition with China is going to make American higher ed more patriotic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enemy of My Dreams is just $2.99 on Kindle! ⁠⁠⁠Help keep our podcast going by contributing to our Patreon! Short answer: no. Long answer: no, and they didn't function that well in pluralistic Roman society, either. Many of the qualities of high-control Christianity--spiritual warfare, fascistic tendencies, the desire to bring on the end times through war in the Middle East, Christian persecution complex, refusal to follow societal norms, demons--were there at the beginning, date to very specific times in the Church's early history, and threatened Roman society in a way surprisingly similar to how they're threatening ours now. Join us as we attempt to chart the connection between the religious nonsense we're all being tortured with today and its deepest roots in history--with Brad Onishi, scholar of religion, author and co-host of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. Sponsors and Advertising This podcast is a member of Airwave Media podcast network. Want to advertise on our show? Please direct advertising inquiries to advertising@airwavemedia.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leaders from Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales recently issued a joint statement, indicating a desire to work towards independence from the United Kingdom. The parties spoke of their commitment to their connections through shared goals of building a stronger economy, energy resources and rebuilding a relationship with the EU. The path to get there will be complex and look different for each country. The Wire’s Shaun Dourado spoke with Dr. Rob Manwaring, associate professor of political science and public policy at Flinders University. Dr. Rob gives an overview of the situation and starts by discussing the significance of this moment.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you have access to Google Maps, or preferably, an original wall map of Africa, stand back for a moment to savour the grand vista which is southern Africa. Living on the tip looking upwards creates a culture of outwardness, a mental and psychological state of eternal expansion. Despite this grandiosity, for many, it is a place of entrapment, they express sentiments of being stuck at the end of Africa, peering outwards to the continents of Europe, or America, Australasia with a sense of longing. It is as though we are fenced in by our own preconceptions, endlessly scrolling through the timelines of the grand and glorious X Y or Z generation gallavanting through the safe woods of Croatia, swimming along the elegant isles of the Med, wondering at the delights of the Barrier Reef. Croatia, of course, is where European-based ethnic cleansing took place in 1995. Europe is where almost 50 million died 70 years ago in a world war. America has been transfixed by a form of national socialism, Australia faces Chinese hegemony. Still, humans are a strange bunch, history a distant ship smoke on the horizon. It is a pitiful state where middle-class South Africans appear to have become transfixed by the myth of greengrassism. Where the grass is always greener on the other side. Our ancestors made their way into south Africa with a very different set of personal codes. From the earliest San, the Khoekhoe, then the Bantu settlers, then the European settlers, all arrived in this territory with plans and dreams. The dream may have been purely survival, or seeking treasure, for some it was purely adventure, for others, a combination of the above. But all of our ancestors had a plan which involved movement, migration, heading out to the next vista with necessities of whatever sort packed away and taken along. They were stoked by imagination, courageous, expansive. Looking at that southern African map a few important facts leap out. There are three main corridors from the south to the centre. One lies to the East, which can be tricky as it harbours fevers, faster flowing rivers, and inhabitants stretching back millennia. The centre is cooler in places, it is higher ground, but it also suffers from a lack of water, slow flowing larger rivers, and as you move north, geology plays tricks on you. To the west, well, there's a bloody great series of deserts, marching from the Karoo, Namaqualand, to the Kalahari, into the Namib, then into the Angolan plateau. Good luck using that route, even these days. Take a Land Cruiser with spare tanks, tyres and don't forget the satellite phone. There are a few important characters in this episode. One is Lobengula kaKhumalo, the descendant of Mzilikazi who had led his followers away from Shaka. You know his story if you've followed this series. Lobengula was crowned king of Ndebele in 1868 after a short, sharp civil war, at the great place called Mhlanhlandlela. He had long been tolerant of the Boer and English hunters who showed up as his home in Matabeleland, and in 1870 had even granted Sir John Swinburne's London and Limpopo Mining Company the right to search for gold along the Tati River — between the Shashe and Ramaquabane Rivers. N those days, the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, but people like MacNeill were working towards Home Rule. In what can only be called a head scratcher, Rhodes fell in with the nationalists. He knew that they had 85 seats in the British parliament and were strategically important, many times when the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party were at loggerheads, it was the Irish Parliamentary Party that turned into King-makers, holding the balance of power in the House of Commons.

If you have access to Google Maps, or preferably, an original wall map of Africa, stand back for a moment to savour the grand vista which is southern Africa. Living on the tip looking upwards creates a culture of outwardness, a mental and psychological state of eternal expansion. Despite this grandiosity, for many, it is a place of entrapment, they express sentiments of being stuck at the end of Africa, peering outwards to the continents of Europe, or America, Australasia with a sense of longing. It is as though we are fenced in by our own preconceptions, endlessly scrolling through the timelines of the grand and glorious X Y or Z generation gallavanting through the safe woods of Croatia, swimming along the elegant isles of the Med, wondering at the delights of the Barrier Reef. Croatia, of course, is where European-based ethnic cleansing took place in 1995. Europe is where almost 50 million died 70 years ago in a world war. America has been transfixed by a form of national socialism, Australia faces Chinese hegemony. Still, humans are a strange bunch, history a distant ship smoke on the horizon. It is a pitiful state where middle-class South Africans appear to have become transfixed by the myth of greengrassism. Where the grass is always greener on the other side. Our ancestors made their way into south Africa with a very different set of personal codes. From the earliest San, the Khoekhoe, then the Bantu settlers, then the European settlers, all arrived in this territory with plans and dreams. The dream may have been purely survival, or seeking treasure, for some it was purely adventure, for others, a combination of the above. But all of our ancestors had a plan which involved movement, migration, heading out to the next vista with necessities of whatever sort packed away and taken along. They were stoked by imagination, courageous, expansive. Looking at that southern African map a few important facts leap out. There are three main corridors from the south to the centre. One lies to the East, which can be tricky as it harbours fevers, faster flowing rivers, and inhabitants stretching back millennia. The centre is cooler in places, it is higher ground, but it also suffers from a lack of water, slow flowing larger rivers, and as you move north, geology plays tricks on you. To the west, well, there's a bloody great series of deserts, marching from the Karoo, Namaqualand, to the Kalahari, into the Namib, then into the Angolan plateau. Good luck using that route, even these days. Take a Land Cruiser with spare tanks, tyres and don't forget the satellite phone. There are a few important characters in this episode. One is Lobengula kaKhumalo, the descendant of Mzilikazi who had led his followers away from Shaka. You know his story if you've followed this series. Lobengula was crowned king of Ndebele in 1868 after a short, sharp civil war, at the great place called Mhlanhlandlela. He had long been tolerant of the Boer and English hunters who showed up as his home in Matabeleland, and in 1870 had even granted Sir John Swinburne's London and Limpopo Mining Company the right to search for gold along the Tati River — between the Shashe and Ramaquabane Rivers. N those days, the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, but people like MacNeill were working towards Home Rule. In what can only be called a head scratcher, Rhodes fell in with the nationalists. He knew that they had 85 seats in the British parliament and were strategically important, many times when the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party were at loggerheads, it was the Irish Parliamentary Party that turned into King-makers, holding the balance of power in the House of Commons.

The Katherine Massey Book Club @ The C.O.W.S. hosts Session 10 on The Memoirs of Robert & Mabel Williams: African American Freedom, Armed Resistance, & International Solidarity. Moving forward from last week's travels be China and Vietnam, we'll pick up with Chapter 54. Recapping last week and Robert Williams' increased commitment to publicizing their Counter-Violence views, we saw the ongoing and widespread resistance he faced from White and non-white people who insisted that not all White people are Racist: Not All White People Are Racist? A major them of Robert's memoir seems to be the struggle - or near mandate - to find some people classified as White who are not Racist. A number of White and non-white people chastise Mr. Williams for not including or discussing Racism in a way that allows for "good White people." Gus T. has faced similar criticisms for rejecting 'Not All White People Are Racist' dogma. Buckets of Words: White and non-white people deluged Robert Williams with every term imaginable. Marxist Leninist. Communist. Nationalist. Black Nationalist. Revolutionary. Counter-Revolutionary. None of these terms have been defined and it frequently seems like a refined form of name-calling when applying these labels to non-white people. No Love for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: Gus noted 2 key dates are highlighted in Williams work. September 1963. And April 1968. In the former he laments the bombing of the Birmingham, Alabama church, and later on he details his talks on Racism in China. Williams remains mum about the August 1963 March on Washington and the April 1968 assassination of Dr. King. Doesn't even share how King's murder was reported internationally. "If you can't say anything nice..." #TheCOWS17Years #NegroesWithGuns #RobertWilliams #MabelWilliams #Communism #Vietnam #TheMemoirsOfRobertAndMabelWilliams #Cuba #FidelCastro #CounterRacism #CounterViolence #GlobalWhiteSupremacy Call-In Number: 720.716.7300 Code: 564943#

In 1935, tens of thousands who had followed Mao Zedong on the Long March across China struggled to survive. They were fleeing Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces during the country's civil war.Zhong Ming was one of them. In 2014, a year before his death, he spoke to the late Edward Stourton about his experience.Witness History is a short BBC World Service podcast about history that takes you inside big moments from the past through first-hand testimony and archive. Each weekday, in around nine minutes, we revisit one moment that helped shape the world and hear it through the voice of someone who was there. Scientists, artists, campaigners, soldiers, leaders and everyday people tell their true stories.When you subscribe to Witness History, you'll be taken inside turning points in world affairs from West Africa's fight back against Boko Haram in 2015 to the behind-closed-doors talks that led to the US-Cuba “thaw” and the surprise announcement of restored relations. You'll discover what it was like to experience disasters and how people recovered from them, including the Tabasco floods in Mexico, Portugal's worst train disaster, and the huge clean-up after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. You'll explore culture and ideas too: Sweden's Expedition Robinson, often credited as the first modern reality TV game show; the friendship between The Beatles' George Harrison and Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar; and the night a tiger attack brought Las Vegas superstars Siegfried and Roy's show to a sudden end. And if you're curious about inventions, we'll tell you how air fryers, BlackBerry, YouTube, Alexa, GPS, superglue, the shopping cart (shopping trolley) and bubble tea were created.If you're new to Witness History, the appeal is simple: real voices, one strong true story, and a fresh way to understand today through events from history – all in the time it takes to enjoy a cup of tea or a walk around the block. Join millions of BBC World Service podcast listeners around the globe and enjoy the insight, context and detail Witness History will bring you.(Photo: Soldiers of the Red Army led by Mao Zedong in 1935 in northern Shensi at their arrival after the Long March. Credit: XINHUA/AFP via Getty Images)

Last time we spoke about the battle of Hong Kong. On the night of December 18th, six Japanese battalions crossed Hong Kong harbour under cover of darkness and burning oil tanks. The Rajputs fought stubbornly but were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Maltby fatally underestimated the assault, holding reserves against a frontal attack that never came. The breakthrough sparked a cascade of disasters. Elderly British businessmen and World War I veterans—the Hughsiliers—heroically held the North Point power station for 18 hours, delaying the entire Japanese advance. Private Geoghan, wounded but undeterred, charged a Japanese officer and killed him, incredibly surviving. The battle's focal point became Wongneichong Gap, where Brigadier Lawson died defending his headquarters. Desperate, piecemeal counter-attacks by Canadians and Scots failed amid chaos and poor coordination. Finally, a single Canadian company under Lieutenant Blackwood held the position for four days against overwhelming odds, killing over 200 enemy soldiers before surrendering. The Japanese suffered 800 casualties but seized the island's strategic heart.   #218 The Battle of Hong Kong Part 3: Black Christmas Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. By dawn on December 20, the Japanese Army had consolidated its position across Hong Kong Island. The 1/229th and 2/228th prepared to sweep southeastward from Taitam and Saiwan toward Stanley. The 2/229th and 3/229th, positioned near Stanley Gap, readied themselves to advance toward Repulse Bay. East of Wongneichong Gap, the 1/228th poised for the push toward Deep Water Bay, while the 3/228th, one of the original reserve battalions, had just arrived on the northern shore. On Jardine's Lookout, two fresh battalions—the 1/230th and 2/230th—prepared to advance westward across the gap. The West Brigade, meanwhile, held a fragile, ill-defined line: Z Company of the 1st Middlesex and Rajput survivors at Leighton Hill in the north, the 2 Royal Scots on the northern slopes of Mount Nicholson, and the Winnipeg Grenadiers, minus D Company, still clinging to pillboxes at Wongneichong Gap. The 228th Regiment moved first, tasked with clearing Postbridge House of its remaining defenders. Simultaneously, the 229th dispatched reconnaissance teams past Violet Hill toward the cliffs overlooking Repulse Bay Hotel—that opulent five-star resort now transformed into an impromptu fortress sheltering evacuees, soldiers, and sailors. What awaited was an epic three-day siege. Despite their gains, the Japanese later confessed that British resistance proved far stiffer than anticipated. They spent much of the 20th consolidating positions and bringing up supplies rather than pressing forward. Maltby, determined not to cede the initiative, dispatched a Royal Rifles company and two HKVDC platoons to the hotel with orders to attack the Gap from the south via Violet Hill. They recaptured the garages and outhouses but lacked the artillery support necessary to advance further. Growing anxious, Maltby sent a desperately weak platoon of the 2/14 Punjab—only 25 men—to reinforce them and push along the southern coast. Colonel Kidd, commanding the Punjab regiment, personally led an assault on Shouson Hill to link up with besieged sailors. He was killed in the attempt, and the mixed force of sailors and Punjabis fell back with severe losses. By the 22nd, after pressing forward from Shouson Hill, the Japanese seized Brick Hill and systematically beheaded all survivors. Yet the Japanese conquest contained stubborn pockets that refused to crumble. The HKSRA gunners held one end of Brick Hill. A ragtag force of HKVDC, naval personnel, Canadians, and Middlesex under Major Dewar maintained Little Hong Kong's ammunition store. HMS Cicala, providing artillery support from Deep Water Bay, was struck from the air and scuttled, eventually sinking in the Lamma Channel. Colonel H. B. Rose, the HKVDC commander, assumed control of the West Brigade following Brigadier Lawson's death. He spent much of the 20th preparing an ambitious counter-attack: the 2 Royal Scots and Winnipeg Grenadiers would drive toward the Gap from the west, supported by B Company of the Grenadiers, brought up from Pokfulam on the island's western coast. The operation commenced poorly. B Company arrived late to find that the Royal Scots had already departed Mount Nicholson's eastern slopes for reasons no one could later explain. The Grenadiers attacked alone through pitch darkness and torrential rain, splitting into two groups that circled Mount Nicholson from opposite directions, meeting above the Gap at dawn. Colonel Doi's tactical instinct struck again. Observing the undefended summit of Mount Nicholson—lost through British inattention—he seized the moment. That afternoon, under cover of heavy rain, he ordered the 1/228th in a three-company formation to take the position without opposition. When B Company blundered into the Japanese, a savage close-quarters battle erupted that cost the Grenadiers all their officers, seven NCOs, and 29 men. Overwhelmed, B Company retreated to Mount Nicholson's western slope as Doi prepared to exploit his success and assault Mount Cameron. At dawn on the 21st, Wallis proposed a new coordinated attack on the Gap. Major T. G. MacAuley of the Royal Rifles led a combined force of Canadian and HKVDC troops from Stanley Mount at 0915 hours. Accurate mortar fire from Red Hill met them immediately. Hand-to-hand combat erupted at Bridge Hill and Notting Hill before the force could push toward the Gap via Violet Hill. By 1700 hours, MacAuley and all HKVDC officers were wounded. Wallis ordered withdrawal. That same morning at 1030 hours, the Japanese launched a second amphibious assault, driving toward Victoria City itself and reaching the east side of what is now Victoria Park. The anti-aircraft gun at Watson's factory in Causeway Bay was silenced. The naval yard suffered devastating mortar bombardment; all its guns fell silent. Major C. R. Templer, assigned to command at Repulse Bay, had successfully repulsed numerous probing attacks. When ordered to assault the Gap with two platoons of Canadian infantry and two HKVDC machine-gun sections, he encountered such overwhelming Japanese force that he abandoned the operation and withdrew beyond Middle Ridge. By dawn on the 22nd, the Japanese finally established heavy artillery on Hong Kong Island. Two battalions of the 229th concentrated on Repulse Bay Hotel. The divisional reserves—1/229th and 1/230th—deployed against the East Brigade as it fell back to its last bastion: Stanley Peninsula. Stanley's defenses were organized in three concentric zones. The forward area, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Home, comprised elements of the 1st Middlesex, Royal Rifles companies, and HKVDC troops, supported by a single 2-pounder gun. Stanley village, under Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox, held the second line with artillery pieces and mixed infantry. A final reserve at Stanley Hill and Fort, under Lieutenant Colonel Shaw, contained the last of the artillery and the 1st and 2nd HKVDC batteries. To the west, British forces barely held their positions. The 2/14 Punjab, 1st Middlesex, 4/7 Rajputs, Royal Scots, and Winnipeg Grenadiers stretched along Mount Cameron and the northern heights—a thin, exhausted line facing Japanese battalions concentrated along a kilometer-long front. At noon on the 22nd, Japanese forces attacked Stanley Mound and Sugarloaf, held by B Company of the Royal Rifles augmented with platoons from HQ and D Companies. Despite multiple repulses, ammunition shortages forced the Canadians to retire to the southern slopes. The situation at Repulse Bay Hotel deteriorated daily, yet Major Templer continued to hold against repeated assaults. As Christmas Eve dawned, all defenders faced grim circumstances. The Royal Rifles of Canada, shattered from bearing the brunt of Japanese attacks, withdrew into Stanley Fort—but not before a heated confrontation between Lieutenant Colonel Home and Brigadier Wallis in which the Canadians bitterly accused their comrades of not "pulling their weight." In the evening of december 21st, Lt Colonel Home, now the senior surviving Canadian officer, spoke to Lt Colonel Sutcliffe, learning about the plight of the Winnipeg grenadiers trying to hold the crest of Mount Cameron. Sutcliffe reported that "his battalion was decimated and yet the high command was ordering his men to make counter attacks. So he asked Home if he could not do something to stop what he considered a useless waste of lives." Home took this to heart and began to inform Brigadier Wallis that he wanted to see the Governor. He said to Wallis "his battalion was exhausted; further resistance would only result in the waste of valuable Canadian lives; as senior Canadian officer he felt a grave responsibility" Wallis persuaded Home to wait until morning. Home the next morning was more than ever convinced of the futility of resistance. Its important to note the relationship between senior Canadians and British officers were all but poisoned in Hong Kong, let alone imagine how the Indian or Chinese volunteer forces felt. The Canadians distrusted the British commanders who for the most part got everything wrong in the whole damn operation. Home was threatening a separate Canadian surrender as they had lost confidence in Brigadier Wallis of the east brigade, Maltby and other British staff officers. It seemed to the Canadians they were being sacrificed to ensure the honor of the garrison. As Royal Rifles Major John H price put it  " There were plenty of Canadian officers who had battle experience in the first war who were competent to judge as to the possibility of a successful outcome of the defence of the island. Consider the facts - The Island had been split in two by vastly superior Japanese forces. On the eastern brigade front, which included the Stanley Peninsula, the Royal Rifles and one company of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Force were the only troops who had fought continuously day and night, without rest, since the landing on the 17th and were still carrying all the fighting. By the 21st they had been greatly reduced in fighting strength and by the 23rd to a strength of around 500 all ranks. (It might be interesting to note that when troops in this sector were marched out of Stanley fort as Prisoners of War, they numbered over 2000). It required no great military genius to predict the outcome of the battle once the Japanese had landed on the island with their control of sea and air and great superiority in weapons and men. He felt, I think rightly, that he would be derelict in his duty to his men and to the Canadian Government if he did not communicate his conclusions to the highest authority. Also neither Home nor his officers had any faith in Brig. Wallis' judgement or in his conduct of operations. And who had better right than he had? He and his men were bearing the brunt of the fighting and knew from first hand knowledge the strength and armament of the forces against them. The Higher Command had consistently shown an inability to grasp realities of the situation and to pursue tactics which might have prolonged the struggle but could not have altered the final result."  Stanley's defenses were reorganized into multiple lines. HKVDC companies held scattered positions at Chung Honkok, near the police station, and throughout the village. The 1st Middlesex manned pillboxes with medium machine guns. The second defensive line crossed Stanley Peninsula near St Stephen's College, defended by British, Chinese, and Indian policemen alongside HKVDC troops under Corporal E. C. Drown—all senior officers and NCOs having fallen. The final reserve stretched across St Stephen's Prep School north of the prison, held by Sergeant Murphy's HKVDC section and Captain F. G. Rees's 1st Battery HKVDC. By this stage, prison staff, wardens, and inmates had been pressed into the HKVDC. Among them was "Crumb" Chattey, a former captain of the 1st Middlesex serving a court-martial sentence for homosexual offences under the law of the time. Chattey assumed command of forty jailers and assorted men, including the colony executioner, who mounted a spirited defense. Japanese forces massed on Taitam Road with obvious intent to crush Stanley's remaining defense. Their first assault failed but destroyed two 18-pounders and two 2-pounder guns. Shortly before 2100 hours, a second attack commenced, this time supported by three tankettes. Two were destroyed by 2-pounders, yet No. 2 HKVDC Company was forced back to Stanley village with most of its men lost. Major H. R. Forsyth, the company commander, was recommended for a Victoria Cross for his stubborn defense against overwhelming odds. After midnight, a pillbox manned by C Company of the 1st Middlesex was overrun; Sergeant Sheehan and most of his crew were killed. The HKVDC line fractured. During all of this chaos, at midnight of the the Japanese made it to the field hospital at St Stephens College and this is where our story is going to take one of its darkest turns. In the early hours of Christmas day, the Japanese approached St Stephen's hospital which held approximately 96 wounded soldiers. Doctors and nurses stepped forward to surrender. Two doctors in charge, Lt Dr Colonel Black and his second in command Captain Dr Witney Barred the front door and Black called out 'You can't come in here' 'this is a hospital'. With deliberate aim, one of the Japanese soldiers raised his rifle and shot the doctor through the head.The Japanese mob then surged into the hospital ward, the body of Dr Black was repeatedly bayoneted as he lay at the door. The Japanese proceeded to enter the building and a massacre of unprecedented ferocity took place. The Japanese ripped the bandages off the wounded patients and plunged their bayonets into the amputated arms and legs before finishing them off with a bullet. In half an hour fifty-six wounded soldiers had been massacred while the nursing staff looked on helplessly.  They cut off ears, gouged out eyes, beat and raped the nurses. I want to read to you some testimony made by Sister Miss Amelia Fleming Gordon who witnessed what we now call the St Stephens College Massacre, something probably unknown to many outside Canada or Hong Kong. "Just before dawn there was a terrific howl and shortly afterwards Japanese arrived in large numbers at the front entrance. Captain Scotcher was pulled out and shortly afterwards he instructed me to come out and put my hands above my head. They took my steel helmet and cracked me over the head with it, searched my pockets, took off my red cross band and removed my watch that I had. They shouted for everyone to come out and everyone did except Sgt Parkin, who attempted to run past but was shot dead. We were marched single file into one of the adjacent classrooms, the patients also being brought in. Here we remained for about an hour or two, crowded and huddled together with no room to lie or sit down. Several of our patients between 50 to 60 I imagine were killed during the day. After 2 hours we were marched in single file upstairs and saw dead bodies and blood covering the stairs. We were then put into different classrooms, I went into a small room with four VADS (Mrs smith, Mrs Begg, Mrs Buxton and Mrs Simmons) where there were 5 chinese women. At 4:30m some Japanese soldiers came in and removed Mrs Smith, Begg and Buxton, I never saw them again. One of the Chinese girls told Mrs Simmons they had taken out the 3 women to kill them and would return for us. We were later ordered to bandage wounded Japanese soldiers. They took us to another room overlooking the tennis court, where there were five dead bodies of Red Cross personnel. We were made to sit on these dead bodies. I and Mrs Fideo were taken to other rooms. In my room there were two dead bodies, and I was made to take off all my clothes whilst they removed theirs. Before touching me they apparently became afraid someone was coming and made me put my clothes on again and I was returned to the room where Mrs Simmons and Mrs Andrews-Levinge still were. Mrs Fideo joined us almost immediately in a weeping state and told us she had been raped. We were left in peace for a short time only, 3 soldiers came in and took me in a small adjacent bathroom, knocked me down and all raped me one after the other, and then let me return. Mrs Fideo was then taken and underwent a similar experience. Both Mrs Fideo and I were then taken out a second time and raped as before Mrs Simmons and Mrs Andrews-levigne remained untouched. We were all now desperate and discovering there was a Yale lock on the door we pulled it locking ourselves in. They returned several times during the night but did not force an entrance."   Rifle man Sydney Skelton of "D" company of the Royal Rifles had this to say. ""The Japs stormed the hospital throwing grenades and bayoneting the wounded. I had rolled under a bed and lay as still as I could. A Jap turned me over, kicked me in the face, and tore off my bandages. I didn't move, or make a sound. The guy must have thought I was dead and took off. I heard screams coming from outside, terrible screams I can still hear in my head twenty years later. I saw a Jap coming into the hospital and take men outside at random. One of the wounded they dragged from his bed, cut off his ears, and ripped out his tongue. Then they took him outside and shot him. There was a lull in the din and he heard a British officer shout: "If you can walk or crawl to the door you may be allowed to live."  At this point Skelton tried to crawl to the door: "I was really confused from the anesthetic and I started to crawl, dragging my blanket, towards the door. A guy just ahead of me, a Hong Kong Volunteer, with a clasp knife in his belt, but his hands raised, was bayoneted as soon as he went out the door. The Padre grabbed me and slapped me to my senses. I'm alive today, thanks to him." A Japanese officer entered the hospital, saw Skelton with his wounds bleeding. He tore off Skelton's watch, hit him with the flat side of his sword and ordered him to go upstairs. Though badly wounded, Skelton crawled up the stairs and into a room that would be his prison for the next two days. Skelton spent nearly four years as a captive, first in Hong Kong and later in Japan where he worked as a slave labourer in a coal mine. Somehow, he made it home, where he lived in Scarsboro, Ontario. In a 1961 interview, he said: "Twenty years have passed, but I can never forget Christmas, 1941." On Christmas morning, Brigadier Wallis ordered C Company of the Royal Rifles of Canada to lead a counter-attack retaking the bungalows on Stanley village's ridge. Lieutenant Colonel Home refused. Wallis deployed D Company of the Winnipeg Grenadiers under Major Parker instead. At 1300 hours, the attack went in without artillery support. The 18th Platoon under Sergeant McDonnell penetrated to Stanley village, inflicting heavy casualties in savage hand-to-hand combat, but was eventually driven back to the fort. Of 148 men who attacked, only 44 answered roll call at day's end. Urban defense collapsed in stages. Using mines and a Bofors 40-millimeter gun in an anti-personnel role, the 230th Regiment pushed into Wanchai, held up briefly at the China Fleet Club. At Wanchai Market, an 18-pounder was destroyed. Japanese forces reached the Naval Dockyard's western boundary. The Rajputs fell back west of the racecourse. Mount Parish fell, opening the final approach to Victoria City. Back on December 21st, General Maltby sent a communique to the war office indicated that resistance was almost at an end. According to Sir John Kennedy, the director of Military operations in London "We had to decide whether to order the troops to fight it out or give the Governor permission to surrender as he wished to do... the psychological aspect was of overriding importance, particularly with an Oriental enemy. If we fought to the last round and the last man at Hong Kong, we should gain an indirect military advantage, in that the Japanese would judge our powers of resistance elsewhere by the same standard. Therefore my opinion was that, although it was an unpleasant decision, the garrison should be told to fight it out.". When Prime Minister Churchill was informed he sent a typical churchillian message "there must be no thought of surrender..the enemy must be compelled to expend the utmost life and equipment. There must be vigorous fighting in the inner defenses, and, if need be, from house to house. Every day that you are able to maintain your resistance will help the allied cause". Both the Governor and General had little choice but to agree, on Christmas the governors message was "fight on. Hold fast for king and empire".  By the afternoon it was clear further resistance was futile. At 1530 hours on December 25, Governor Young officially surrendered. A white flag rose over the colony. Young and Major General Maltby crossed Victoria Harbour from Queen's Pier to meet General Sakai at the Peninsula Hotel, renamed "Toa" by its new occupants. It was the first occasion on which a British Crown Colony had surrendered to an invading force. The garrison had held out for 17 days, the day is known in Hong Kong as "black christmas". Lieutenant Colonel R. G. Lamb and Lieutenant J. T. Prior descended from Fortress Headquarters to Stanley to order Brigadier Wallis to lay down arms. Wallis refused without written confirmation. When Major Harland arrived with official orders, Wallis finally capitulated. At 0230 hours on December 26, 1941, he and 2,000 men crossed the lines in surrender. Two days later, on the 28th, the Japanese staged a 2,000-man victory parade led by Lieutenant General Sano on a white horse. While the general paraded, his troops—officially granted three days of "rest and recreation"—embarked on systematic rape and pillage across the fallen colony. Rear-Admiral Chan Chak arrived in Hong Kong in 1938 as an unlikely businessman—General Manager of a stockbroker's firm—but his true role was far more consequential. The one-legged Chinese admiral commanded the Military Mission tasked with coordinating China's war effort with British operations. Working seamlessly with the police special branch and intelligence services, Chan orchestrated a shadow campaign against Japanese sympathizers and traitors, drawing on a network of Nationalist agents, many of whom carried Triad connections. His inner circle included Col. Yee Shiu Kee of Chinese intelligence (posing as an insurance salesman), Lt. Cdr. Henry Hsu as aide-de-camp, and Coxswain Yeung Chuen as bodyguard. As Governor Young prepared to sign the unconditional surrender on Christmas afternoon 1941, Chan received permission to lead an escape attempt. The 2nd MTB Flotilla—vessels MTBs 7, 9, 10, 11 and 27—waited in hiding near Aberdeen Island, but Chan's perilous journey through Victoria's ruins delayed his arrival. Finding the MTBs absent, he boarded HMS Cornflower II instead, only to come under withering machine-gun fire as the launch attempted to reach open water. Abandon ship was called. Chan removed his wooden leg and surrendered his lifebuoy to his non-swimming bodyguard, diving into the chaos with Lt. Cdr. Hsu. Almost immediately, a Japanese bullet tore through Chan's wrist—a crippling wound for a one-armed, one-legged swimmer fighting through hostile fire. The Japanese, sensing they had their quarry, ignited the hillside grass with tracer rounds to drive the men back into the sea. Col. Yee remained aboard the bullet-riddled vessel and was last seen attempting to hide; he would eventually make his way to unoccupied China after several harrowing days. The other escapees scattered across Aberdeen Island in desperation. Hearing the gunfire from their concealment on the far side of the island, the MTBs approached cautiously, rescuing survivors as they went. By 2130 hours on Christmas Day, sixty-eight survivors were racing toward Mirs Bay to rendezvous with Communist guerrillas. There the MTBs were scuttled after valuables were salvaged, and the escape party was welcomed as heroes and guided safely to Huizhou in unoccupied China. This dramatic flight marked the first of many escapes and signaled the beginning of Allied cooperation with the Chinese Communist forces. As British forces withdrew from Kowloon, a new force emerged from the shadows. The Guangdong People's Anti-Japanese Guerrillas East River Column (ERC)—a battle-hardened Communist organization founded in 1938—took up the struggle against the Japanese invaders. The ERC had consolidated various local anti-Japanese forces that sprang up after Guangzhou fell to Japan, anchoring itself on two formidable core units: Zeng Sheng's Baoan People's Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Main Force and Wang Zuorao's East Baoan regiment. By the eve of Hong Kong's invasion, the Third and Fifth Column fielded fifteen hundred fighters—seasoned veterans who had waged three years of resistance across Guangdong Province. Even as the British capitulated, Chinese Hongkongers—farmers and fishermen mostly—took up arms alongside their Communist allies. By year's end, over one hundred ERC members operated clandestinely in Hong Kong. In February 1942, to better organize this growing force, the HKKIB was formally established under Cai Guoliang's command, with Political Commissar Chen Daming answering to Zeng Sheng as overall commander of the ERC. The ERC's first mission was audacious in scope: rescue prominent Chinese and foreign VIPs trapped in Hong Kong. While China burned, the colony had remained a haven for industrialists, politicians, authors and dignitaries fleeing the war—now all vulnerable to Japanese occupation. Between December 1941 and June 1942, the ERC spirited over eight hundred key figures past Japanese lines to safety, while simultaneously escorting more than two thousand overseas Chinese volunteers eager to join the anti-Japanese war effort. The guerrillas also became architects of POW liberation. In March 1942, when British prisoners were forced to labor at Kai Tak Airport, the ERC deployed English-speaking operatives disguised as street vendors to infiltrate the airfield and extract Captain Thompson and four comrades through the rainwater culvert system. Among notable rescues were Lt. Col. Ride of the HKVDC (who would establish the British Army Aid Group), naval officers including Lt. J. W. Hurston of the Royal Navy, artillery officer Lt. G. D. Clagne, Indian soldiers such as Lashkar Singh and Mehnga Singh, and key civilians: the HSBC banker T. J. J. Fenwick, Police Superintendent W. P. Thompson, and foreign nationals—Russians, Danes, Norwegians—who found sanctuary in the unoccupied interior. Most were escorted to safety in China, but two Royal Scots soldiers—Joseph Gallaher and Daniel Hodges—remained with the ERC for six weeks, training guerrilla fighters in the use of British weapons and medium machine guns. These two Scottish soldiers became among the few Westerners to fight alongside Chinese Communist forces, a testament to the bonds forged in shared struggle against the Japanese occupier.   The casualty figures for Hong Kong remain contested. General Maltby's immediate post-war reports claimed 2,123 defenders dead or missing with 1,332 wounded, but these were later deemed inflated. The Chief Signal Officer, imprisoned after the surrender, compiled a more credible tally: 2,721 dead and missing. Modern estimates place military casualties around 1,600, including medical personnel from St John Ambulance. Civilian losses proved far grimmer—estimates suggest approximately 7,000 killed. Japanese records tell a different story. The Defence Agency historical section documented 1,720 Japanese deaths, while the Japanese occupation authority's own newspaper, Hong Kong News, reported 1,966 dead and 6,000 wounded on 29 December 1941. On 20 February 1942, Major-General Isogai Rensuke took office as Governor, commanding occupation forces under Brigadier Okada Umekichi. Three independent infantry regiments and supporting artillery maintained control of the colony. The occupiers' brutality would not escape Allied judgment. Major-General Ito, commander of the division's infantry, faced war crimes convictions. More prominently, Lieutenant-General Sakai, the 38th Army's commander and temporary governor, was tried, convicted, and executed by firing squad in 1946. Major-General Isogai received life imprisonment for war crimes but was released in 1967. Lieutenant-General Tanaka, final Japanese Governor and commander of the 23rd Army, was executed in 1947. Of the senior commanders, only Vice-Admiral Niimi survived the war, living to age 106.  General Maltby endured captivity throughout the East, moving from Hong Kong to Shanghai and Taiwan, finally reaching a camp near the Chinese-Mongolian border before repatriation from Shenyang (Mukden). His tenure received no official recognition despite the stubborn defense he had mounted. Lieutenant-Colonel White of the 2 Royal Scots survived internment but died shortly after returning to Britain, his health shattered by cancer. Governor Young resumed office in late 1946, attributing the colony's rapid loss to insufficient Chinese support for the British war effort. His attempts to introduce representative government alarmed London, which promptly replaced him with Sir Robert Black. Young retired in 1947. Maltby, too, retired from the Army soon afterward, also without honor. Not all were forgotten. Rear-Admiral Chan received an honorary KBE from British Ambassador Sir Horace Seymour. Colonel Yee was granted an honorary CBE, and Lieutenant-Commander Henry Hsu an honorary OBE. Hsu, a gifted athlete, became a member of the International Olympic Committee representing Chinese Taipei. Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart of 1 Middlesex died from illness in 1942. Three HKRNVR men—Petty Officer J. W. Fallace, W. C. Johnstone, and civilian Arthur Evans—escaped from the Lisbon Maru and reached Chongqing (Chunking). Of 1,834 POWs aboard that transport, only 716 returned home. Lieutenant Walda, responsible for brutal treatment of prisoners, died before sentencing; Captain Koyda, the Lisbon Maru's commander, received seven years' imprisonment. The British authorities formally acknowledged the East River Column's role—without its aid, no escapee would have survived the treacherous journey to freedom. When future Prime Minister James Callaghan raised questions in Parliament, the government responded with generous monetary awards, free medical care, and employment opportunities for survivors and their families. Many settled in the United Kingdom; others remained to serve in public and private sectors until Hong Kong's return to China in 1997, when the ERC liaison office became the local branch of the New China News Agency. Zeng Sheng, the ERC commander, rose to become Deputy Chief of Staff of the South China Military Region, then Deputy Provincial Governor and Mayor of Guangzhou. Purged during the Cultural Revolution, he was rehabilitated and became Minister of Communication in 1979. He died in Guangzhou in November 1995. One hundred twenty-eight HKVDC members, forty-nine soldiers of the British Army, and fifty personnel from transport and civil defense units escaped to Free China. The RAF transported them to Assam, then Calcutta, via the British Army Aid Group. The first groups joined the 9th Battalion of the Border Regiment at Fort William; the third and fourth joined the 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment. Initially relegated to non-combatant roles, their fortunes changed when Brigadier Michael Calvert—who had served in pre-war Hong Kong commanding the Chinese Sappers—called for volunteers to fight the Japanese in Burma. All stepped forward. After months of intensive training, they were formally enrolled on 14 February 1943 as the Hong Kong Volunteer Company, integrated into Wingate's legendary Chindits, where they would see action deep behind Japanese lines in the jungles of Burma. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.   During Hong Kong's 1941 Christmas invasion, Japanese forces committed atrocities against wounded soldiers and nurses. After seventeen days of brutal resistance, Governor Young surrendered on December 25th. Rear-Admiral Chan Chak escaped through machine-gun fire, while the East River Column guerrillas conducted daring rescues, extracting over 800 VIPs and 2,000 volunteers to safety in unoccupied China.          

0907226 German Nationalist Win, Ohio Candidate Attacked, Giuliani Slur, J'Ouvert Celebration by The News with Paul DeRienzo

Episode 405 of RevolutionZ moves from Community and race last episode to Kinship, patriarchal sex gender relations, and feminism this episode. We start by noting, however, that after our What Is To Be Undone episodes that criticized long-standing left orthodoxies we got nearly no pushback at all--and none publicly--and wondering why that was while also hoping that soon reactions will appear. Then this episode turns to ideas for a modified approach to gender, feminism, and the kinship sphere that greatly impacted revolutionary debate forty years ago and needs to do so now too. The material is excerpted from a book, Liberating Theory, that was co-authored by seven prominent activists and published in 1986. We authors tried to put forth positive proposals to later adapt and refine to arrive at a conceptual toolbox able to guide activism more successfully than the ideologies we employed in  earlier periods. Liberating Theory hoped to aid creation of a New New Left. Its third chapter, presented here, summarized how kinship institutions organize the human life cycle, define roles like mother, father, husband, wife, and child, and then attach status and power to those roles in ways that harden into and continually reproduce patriarchy.. The chapter argued and thus this episode argues that biology mainly sets the terms for child-birth and breastfeeding, while nearly all of what we call “masculine” and “feminine” is socially produced through role dictates, rewards, and repeated training. That's where the episode investigate mothering vs fathering as social roles, and why to assign nurturance to women and public power to men doesn't only shape families, but also spills into work, politics, and culture. The episode then considers sexuality as a related political battleground, and names heterosexism and homophobia as structural forces that can cost people safety, jobs, housing, and even custody, and life itself, even beyond molding “opinions” and personal biases. From there, this episode takes up a problem our survey of social spheres keeps encountering: monist theories that treat one sphere at the base of everything. We credit radical feminism's sharp insights while we also push back on reductionism that in this case obscures or even erases class, race, and political power. The idea was not merely to criticize but to prepare the way for concepts able to highlight how kinship helps define other spheres of life and is in turn part defined by them.The episode concludes, as do all others in this sequence, with a lively dialogue that puts diverse conflicts and issues on the table, including pornography, censorship, the fear that movements will splinter into endless faction fights, and more. The book's dialogues each include a diverse array of characters ranging from Marxist Leninist to Anarchist, Feminist to Nationalist, Socialist Feminist to Council Communist, and downright Cynical (who wants everyone to go home) to Complementary Holist (who represents and advocates the book's preferred stance). The idea this and indeed all the dialogues is for their human and sometimes pithy and sarcastic and other times impatient and funny exchanges to help us assess an emerging set of concepts and their connections to inform and also be informed by concepts and views addressing other defining spheres of social life all on the road to a new view of history and struggle to help us win a new world. The seven authors of Liberating Theory were Michael Albert, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Lydia Sargent, and Holly Sklar.Support the show

Andy Burnham is a UnionistShould we have been surprised by British Prime Minister Andy Burnham's crass assertion last week that the issue of the unity referendum promised in the Good Friday Agreement, “is one issue that will be off the table.”?Two months ago as I watched Burnham address the media outside10 Downing St, on the day he replaced Keir Starmer, I wrote that he; “like every British Prime Minister governs in the interests of the English establishment. He like his predecessors is a Unionist.”For as far back as England's involvement in Ireland its policies have always been determined by British national interests. Not the interests of the Irish people.Drumcree – Unionism Stuck in the PastIn the early hours of Sunday 6 July 1997 I remember vividly driving back from an event in Tralee, County Kerry because of the growing tension over Unionist demands to march down the Garvaghy Road. I arrived home as David Blevins for Sky News broke the news that hundreds of British soldiers and RUC had swamped the nationalist streets of Garvaghy Road. Protestors were swept aside and the Orange Order got its march. There were widespread civil disturbances as nationalist areas reacted to the developments. 1997 was the last year a march took place. The Parade Commission decisions and the opposition of the local community had seen to that.Last week Drumcree and the Garvaghy Road jumped back into the media headlines when the High Court in Belfast quashed a determination by the Parades Commission to ban this year's Drumcree march. It did so because of a procedural flaw in how that decision was reached.The High Court decision did not clear the way for an Orange Order parade to proceed down the Garvaghy Road. But it did lead to an increase in the sectarian bombast that has long been part and parcel of political unionism in the northern state. The UUP, DUP and TUV have all united to claim “a massive victory for unionism and loyalism” and to demand that the Orange Order be able to march through the nationalist Garvaghy Road area. They want to turn the clock back to the ‘No surrender' ‘Not an Inch' ethos of the Orange State. They want a return to the old order.That will not happen. Nationalists and non-unionists are looking to the future not the past. The nationalist community of the Garvaghy Road area is greater now than it was in 1997. It has lived in peace for almost 30 years. It deserves to be able to continue to do so and there is no desire within that community to facilitate a sectarian Orange march. Paddy ElliottThe Elliott's and the Adams's were cousins. They still are. Maybe second or third cousins by this generation. But back in the day my Granny Adams was a Begley. So was Paddy Elliott's mammy. And Gerry Begley's Daddy. Brother and sisters. Paddy and Gerry were six or seven years older than me. They were inseparable when I was growing up.I was living in Abercorn Street North with my Granny. Gerry Begley lived in the same street. I think Paddy was reared in Gibson Street, but he spent a lot of time in Abercorn Street North. There were very few cars in those days so the streets belonged to the children. Especially during the summer. Girls and boys. Dogs.  Hopscotch and Marlies. Skipping songs, swings on the lamp posts, rounders, street soccer with a ball made from a sock filled with newspapers, hurling and handball.

Imagine a small town in rural Tennessee — a town square, a yellow brick courthouse, a family-owned restaurant, a café, and beautiful sunrises and sunsets across the Appalachian foothills.Now, imagine a group of far-right real estate developers — backed by Silicon Valley venture capital and with powerful ties to Washington — move into town. They have a vision to build a new kind of community and turn it into a haven for like-minded white Christians.That's what's happening in Gainesboro, Tennessee. And it's part of a growing movement by some far-right Christian nationalists to relocate to red states and turn small towns into white enclaves. Locals in Gainesboro are alarmed. They call it a “takeover.” And they are pushing back. That's the story of “Our Town,” a new Bloomberg investigative podcast series. We sit down with its hosts to talk about this takeover in Tennessee.Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

The former UK Prime Minister and Chancellor joins Yonit and Jonathan for the latest of our Unholy Conversations — on the void populist nationalists have moved into, on the difference between hope and optimism, on the father whose projector slides taught him the kings of Israel before the kings of England, and on the Middle East peace deal he watched come apart in 2009. Chapters: 00:06 Introduction to Gordon Brown and His New Book 05:48 The Connection Between Nationalism and Community Decline 12:46 Personal Responsibility and Moral Leadership 17:23 Addressing Anti-Semitism and Global Issues 22:41 Hope vs. Optimism in Times of Crisis 30:13 Britain's Role in Global Peace Efforts 32:27 Personal Reflections and Motivations of Gordon Brown

When new neighbors move into Gainesboro, Tennessee, a small town at the foothills of Appalachia, locals are confused. Who are these self-proclaimed pioneers? And what do they want with their little town?Locals soon discover the new arrivals are connected to something much larger: A network of far-right Christians who have ties to Washington and are backed by venture capital.This is a story about a battle over identity fought on small town soil with small town spunk. Where acreage, heritage, and what it means to be an AmericanEpisodes available here:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1308-our-town-270064417/episode/introducing-our-town-340326011/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

Greg considers voting and God's providence, Christendom and the separation of church and state.   Episode 1354 Greg's new book: Inspired Imperfection Dan's new book: Confident Humility Send Questions To: Dan: @thatdankentTwitter: @reKnewOrg Facebook: ReKnew Email: askgregboyd@gmail.com Links: Greg's book:"Crucifixion of the Warrior God" Website: ReKnew.org  

On this episode of Axis Live, Brad Onishi and Matthew D. Taylor examine growing efforts to undermine confidence in the 2026 elections, including claims about foreign interference, voter rolls, mail-in voting, and calls from figures on the American right for a national emergency. They discuss how election-denial rhetoric can shift from questioning election integrity to challenging the legitimacy of results, and why the period after the election could be as important as Election Day itself. The second half of the episode focuses on Jake Lang, his increasingly confrontational political spectacles, his Christian supremacist rhetoric, and the larger movement behind him. Following Lang's confrontation with a protester dressed as Spider-Man, Brad, Matt, and writer Kate Burns examine how provocation, confrontation, and claims of persecution can become political content.

Mehdi challenges Pastor Douglas Wilson – who preached at Pete Hegseth's Pentagon this year – on women's rights, gay rights, Muslims, slavery, and whether the U.S. Constitution is a Christian document. SUBSCRIBE TO ZETEO TO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT AND UNFILTERED JOURNALISM: https://zeteo.com/subscribe   WATCH 'MEHDI UNFILTERED' ON SUBSTACK: https://zeteo.com/s/mehdi-unfiltered   FIND ZETEO: Twitter: https://twitter.com/zeteo_news Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zeteonews TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@zeteonews   FIND MEHDI: Substack: https://substack.com/@mehdirhasan Twitter: https://twitter.com/@mehdirhasan Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@mehdirhasan TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mehdirhasan   To advertise on the show, contact sales@advertisecast.com or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/Zeteo  

Where did “In God We Trust” really come from, and was it merely Cold War anti-communist propaganda? In this episode of The Magistrate, Josh Howard and James Baird trace the forgotten Civil War-era origins of the phrase on American currency. They discuss Baptist pastor Mark Watkinson, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, U.S. Mint Director James Pollock, Henry Boardman of Tenth Presbyterian Church, the original National Reform Association, and the push to recognize God and the Christian character of the nation in public life. This episode uncovers how “In God We Trust” was part of a broader pan-Protestant effort to call America to national repentance, acknowledge divine sovereignty, and confess dependence upon the God of the Bible.

Where did “In God We Trust” really come from, and was it merely Cold War anti-communist propaganda?In this episode of The Magistrate, Josh Howard and James Baird trace the forgotten Civil War-era origins of the phrase on American currency.They discuss Baptist pastor Mark Watkinson, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, U.S. Mint Director James Pollock, Henry Boardman of Tenth Presbyterian Church, the original National Reform Association, and the push to recognize God and the Christian character of the nation in public life.This episode uncovers how “In God We Trust” was part of a broader pan-Protestant effort to call America to national repentance, acknowledge divine sovereignty, and confess dependence upon the God of the Bible.Watch all of our videos and subscribe to our channel for the latest content >HereHere

Where did “In God We Trust” really come from, and was it merely Cold War anti-communist propaganda? In this episode of The Magistrate, Josh Howard and James Baird trace the forgotten Civil War-era origins of the phrase on American currency. They discuss Baptist pastor Mark Watkinson, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, U.S. Mint Director James Pollock, Henry Boardman of Tenth Presbyterian Church, the original National Reform Association, and the push to recognize God and the Christian character of the nation in public life. This episode uncovers how “In God We Trust” was part of a broader pan-Protestant effort to call America to national repentance, acknowledge divine sovereignty, and confess dependence upon the God of the Bible.

“Most people do not understand that this attempted coup was a religious event.” — Congressman Jared Huffman on January 6 We've featured many stark warnings about the threat of American Christian nationalism from journalists, activists, and religious scholars. Today, that warning comes from inside the government. In No Prophets, Californian congressman Jared Huffman warns that the threat of Christian nationalism could destroy American democracy. Borrowing from Sinclair Lewis, Huffman argues that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross. For Huffman, it's not an abstract threat. On January 6, 2021, he watched something chillingly close to that theological nightmare unfold from his office on Capitol Hill. The attempted coup was a religious event, he insists. The insurrectionists were radicalized by the New Apostolic Reformation. These fanatics had rooms at the Willard beside Giuliani's war room, and they preached and prophesied as the riot unfolded. His Republican colleague Adam Kinzinger tells him Christian nationalism “wasn't just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” And yet the 845-page select committee report ignores this story because, Huffman charges, Liz Cheney personally intervened to erase it. “We are less safe today because of it,” he says. Like so many critics of Christian nationalism, Huffman had a religious upbringing. He grew up devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and then was ordained into its priesthood before losing his faith at twenty after his father's death. Today he is a self-described “humanist,” the co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only member of Congress who admits to not believing in gods. It's an American intellectual tradition, he insists, that he shares with fellow religious skeptics like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party, Jared Huffman insists, are now one and the same. Huffman might not believe in gods, but there's a biblical quality to his apocalyptic warnings. The prophet of No Prophets is putting all that religious training to good secular use. Five Takeaways •       January 6 Was a Religious Event. The book's foundational claim, witnessed from Huffman's Capitol Hill office: the insurrection was saturated with religious choreography — symbols, worship services, self-declared prophets exhorting the crowd. The mob was radicalized by groups like the New Apostolic Reformation, a virulent Christian supremacist movement committed to dominion by any means necessary; organizers held rooms at the Willard Hotel beside Giuliani's war room, were tasked by the Trump campaign with mobilizing right-wing Christians, and preached and prophesied on-site as the riot unfolded. The Smithsonian's Uncivil Religion exhibit documented it in real time, and Adam Kinzinger told Huffman that Christian nationalism “wasn't just part of the insurrection. It was the whole story, the whole thing.” Yet the select committee's 845-page report contains none of it — erased, Huffman charges, by Liz Cheney's personal intervention. “We are less safe today because of it.”•       The Endgame Is Theocracy. Trump and the movement are codependent: he mainstreamed fringe prophets into White House VIPs; they supplied mobilization power nothing else in American politics can match, and wrapped him in the “Cyrus anointing” — the mythology of a flawed pagan king used by God to save his chosen people. The Washington operation is Huffman's “shadow theocracy”: Ralph Drollinger's Capitol Ministries runs Bible studies teaching officeholders that God opposes taxes and the regulatory state but is keenly interventionist about the bedroom; Speaker Mike Johnson — who preaches “biblically sanctioned government,” rejects church-state separation outright, joined pre-January 6 prayer calls, and architected the legal effort to overturn 2020 — sits second in line to the presidency. Kinzinger's joke lands hard: the American Taliban. Are the Drollingers grifters or believers? Both, says Huffman — the two have never been mutually exclusive.•       Atwood Wasn't Writing Fiction. Huffman found The Handmaid's Tale chilling precisely because Atwood didn't invent Gilead — she reverse-engineered it from America's puritanical past and theocratic subcultures, and had it arrive gradually, through fake emergencies. The trad-wife future is already drafted: Pete Hegseth belongs to the TheoBros — the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, led by Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, who says the Nineteenth Amendment was a mistake and men should vote for the household — while radical traditionalist Catholics dream of a pre-Vatican II world of veils and submission. And don't try joking with any of them, Huffman warns: in this absolutist theology, opponents aren't adversaries but demons and antichrists, and destroying what stands in the way is a religious duty.•       A Born-Again Atheist from the Mormon Priesthood. The messenger's unlikely arc: raised devout in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Independence, Missouri (now the progressive Community of Christ), ordained into its priesthood, then unmoored at twenty by his father's death and the questions faith couldn't answer. He settled on humanism — a moral framework without the supernatural — and calls himself a Christ-loving atheist, fully at peace with the Sermon on the Mount. His lineage, he argues, is the founding itself: Jefferson ridiculing “priestcraft,” Franklin's lightning rod denounced by clerics who preferred sprinkling holy water from church towers, Paine and Madison beside them — and the Constitution's secular firewall, Article VI and the First Amendment, as America's original gift to the world. He's politely skeptical of Jonathan Rauch's suggestion that today's LDS church models pluralism: “they've got a long way to go.”•       A Golden Opportunity — If Democrats Dare. Christian nationalism and the Republican Party “are now one and the same,” Huffman argues — which means religious liberty, pluralism, and the majority who want no theocracy have been surrendered to whichever Democrat dares claim them. Most don't: the intersection of religion and politics strikes them as too dicey. Texas's James Talarico is the breakthrough messenger — calling out Christian nationalism from inside the faith, addressing atheists and believers alike — while AOC, a great friend, conspicuously declines every Freethought Caucus invitation, and Newsom awaits his copy of the book. Huffman wants no constitutional amendments: the founders got it right, and the task is defending Article VI and the Establishment Clause from a Supreme Court reading them out of existence. His own ambitions? “Career-limited as a straight white male from Northern California. I'm good with that.” About the Guest Jared Huffman has represented California's 2nd congressional district — from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border — since 2013. A seven-term Democrat, former environmental attorney, co-founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and the only Humanist ever to serve in Congress, he watched the January 6 insurrection from...

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In this episode of Straight White American Jesus, Brad Onishi sits down with Congressman Jared Huffman to discuss his new book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism. Huffman shares his journey from growing up in a devout Mormon community to becoming a humanist and the only openly non-believing member of Congress, and explains how the rise of Trump and Christian nationalism pushed him to speak publicly about the dangers of religious extremism. They discuss the New Apostolic Reformation, January 6, the religious forces surrounding Trump, Mike Johnson, the influence of Christian nationalism in Congress, Christian Zionism, traditionalist Catholicism, and why the separation of church and state is increasingly under threat. Huffman also explains why he believes saving democracy will require religious and nonreligious Americans to work together—and why, even in a deeply troubling political moment, he refuses to give up.

Last time we spoke about the ending of the Second Battle of Changsha. In late September and early October 1941, Chinese commander Chen Cheng planned an operation to retake Yichang, a strategic Yangtze River city whose control was essential for protecting the approach to Chongqing. Japanese forces were pulling back from Changsha, weakened by supply problems and casualties, which created an opportunity for Chen to intensify his campaign. Yichang had been captured by Japan in 1940, a defeat that Chen carried as a personal and political burden. He therefore moved to encircle the Japanese 13th Division inside Yichang and drive it to collapse. Although the Chinese held a clear manpower advantage—fourteen divisions against the encircled Japanese—progress was slowed by stubborn fighting from prepared, entrenched positions. The battle inside the city produced desperate close-quarters combat and heavy casualties, showing how the fate of Yichang and the wider defense of Chongqing were tightly linked.    #214 War hits the Pacific Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War.   The guns fell silent on October 9, 1941, as the Ninth War Zone's forces restored their pre-battle positions, marking the end of the Second Battle of Changsha. The balance sheet was grim on both sides, but it was China that bore the heavier cost. The Ninth Military Front suffered 70,672 killed, wounded, or missing. The concurrent Yichang offensive added a further 21,368 casualties to the Sixth Military Front, a force that outnumbered its Japanese opponents ten to one yet still failed to retake the city. By the time the dust settled, the Chinese army had lost nearly 100,000 men across both theatres. The Chinese command was frank, at least in private, about what had gone wrong. The Japanese had moved with a speed that recalled Blitzkrieg, advancing 130 kilometres in eleven days and withdrawing at twelve kilometres a day, catching the defenders perpetually off-balance. The 26th, 37th, 10th, and 74th Corps had been picked apart piecemeal rather than fighting in concert, the original plan to destroy the Japanese south of the Miluo River coming to nothing. Elite formations had paid a disproportionate price: the 74th Corps suffered 14,521 casualties, the 37th Corps 14,015, and the 58th Division alone lost 6,192 of its 11,907 men, nearly its entire fighting strength.   Yet none of this was the story the public would hear. On October 10th, China's National Day, radio stations announced the "Second Great Victory in Northern Hunan", the annihilation of over 40,000 enemy troops. Newspapers rushed out special editions. Congratulatory telegrams flooded in from government ministries and civic organizations. Senior officials seized on the moment: Sun Ke, Premier of the Executive Yuan, declared that the victory "laid the foundation for the counter-offensive and the recapture of Hankou and Guangzhou," while General Bai Chongxi called it "the pivotal moment for us to turn defeat into victory." Chiang Kai-shek, reading through the pages of triumphant commentary produced overnight by his propagandists, was reportedly impressed by their industry, if not convinced by their content. He had not wanted to call it a victory at all, but the political calculus was unavoidable: after four years of war, an exhausted nation needed the psychological sustenance that only "victory" could provide.   The gap between public performance and private reality was nowhere more visible than in the arrival of a twenty-two-member international press delegation on October 13th. Journalists from Britain, the United States, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Hong Kong, and major Chinese newspapers were flown to Changsha and carefully guided through selected battlefields, where they inspected mountains of war trophies and heard testimony from soldiers and civilians. They left satisfied, presenting their war souvenirs—swords, binoculars, Japanese military flags—to their audiences back home as proof of Chinese heroism and Japanese defeat. Both China and Japan were claiming victory simultaneously. The only conclusion the foreign press could draw was that one side was lying, and it was not the side that had shown them the evidence.   Chiang Kai-shek's real verdict came at the Third Nanyue Military Conference, held from October 16 to 21. His anger was withering. He condemned his generals for their obsession with defending sprawling outer perimeter lines while leaving city centres barely fortified, a mentality so rigid, he said, that the Japanese could announce the exact time of their advance and withdrawal in advance and still execute it on schedule without interference. "Generals, what a disgrace this is!" On the failure to capture prisoners, only 263 prisoners were claimed across the entire front, of whom only 16 names were actually published, he was almost incredulous: "We can definitely defeat the enemy, capture many enemy prisoners, and seize countless enemy weapons! Even if we cannot capture ten thousand prisoners, we should at least capture a thousand! If not a thousand, then at least a hundred! But now, you don't even have ten!" The conference handed down punishments to match the rhetoric. Liao Lingqi, commander of the shattered 58th Division, was sentenced to death for desertion and shot on October 22nd. His men were so outraged that three regimental commanders resigned in protest; the division was pulled from the order of battle entirely and given three months to rebuild. Li Yutang, commander of the 10th Corps, was dismissed—though the Third Battle of Changsha would begin before his replacement could take post, and he would be reinstated to play a key role in the city's defence.   On the Japanese side, the 11th Army acknowledged 1,670 killed, 5,184 wounded, and 14 missing, far fewer than Chinese claims, though post-war regimental histories suggest the true figure was higher. Lieutenant General Anami, who had championed the operation, found himself stung by the charge that the battle had served mainly as material for Chinese propaganda. On November 23rd, he reportedly reacted with visible displeasure when someone in his headquarters said as much aloud.  Anami's annoyance was easy enough to understand, but the accusation carried a troubling degree of accuracy. The Second Battle of Changsha had yielded no decisive strategic gain and no substantial alteration in the military balance. What it did generate, rather effectively, was a story and by the autumn of 1941, stories were one of the few things China still had in plentiful supply. The most consequential struggles were taking place not along the Miluo River, but in foreign ministries and embassies, in Washington and Moscow, in the messages passing between Chongqing and London, and in the increasingly strained calculations of statesmen trying to determine, amid rapidly changing circumstances, whom to support and for how long.   For Chiang Kai-shek, the challenge was never merely military. It was structural, and had been so from the outset. He had always seen clearly, precisely because he understood China's weakness, that Japan could not be defeated by China alone. The country lacked the industrial base, the logistical reach, and after four years of relentless attrition more and more the manpower needed to force a decisive result on the battlefield. China's survival depended on making its war inseparable from the wars of other powers. Since 1937, Chiang's diplomacy had pursued that single objective: convincing enough great powers that their interests were aligned with China's, and holding that coalition together long enough for Japan to be subdued. That effort turned out to be vastly more difficult than it ought to have been.   The problem started with the international order in which the war emerged. Chiang had hoped to assemble a concert of allies willing to help defend China against Japanese aggression. He was blocked not just by the reluctance of neutral states to aid China, but by the speed with which alliances shifted in the opening years of the Second World War. He had never welcomed the prospect of a general European conflict, correctly fearing that it would push China even further to the margins of world attention. Even so, he recognized that once the lines had hardened between the imperial democracies and fascism, new alignments might become possible. From his perspective, the growing amity between Berlin and Moscow was therefore disastrous. He had been eager to draw the USSR into war against Japan. Instead, the Soviets were now effectively aligned with the Nazis, who were themselves allied with Tokyo.   The world created after Versailles had already enraged many Chinese. After all, the May Fourth demonstrations of 1919 had arisen directly from the settlement reached at the Paris Peace Conference. Yet that older order had at least possessed recognizable anchors, especially the dominance of the two great European empires and the United States. Now those empires were weakening, and no one could say with confidence what the new geopolitical order would be. For all Chiang knew, Germany might emerge as Europe's new dominant power. The early years of the European war produced a bewildering spectacle of diplomatic realignment.   The Nationalist government had previously enjoyed a short-lived flirtation with Nazi Germany. In fact, Hitler's regime continued supplying Chiang with munitions in the first months of China's war against Japan. The Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 had theoretically joined Germany, Italy, and Japan into the Axis, but mutual distrust prevented them from forming anything like a fully coherent alliance. Chiang found it useful to imply to Western powers that he might be pushed into closer alignment with Germany, a particularly disturbing possibility for the USSR, which faced enemies in both Europe and Asia. But eventually the contradictions in German policy toward East Asia became too severe. In April 1938, Germany yielded to Japanese pressure and ended its support for China.   Britain offered little meaningful help. Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in May 1937 at the head of a Conservative-led National Government, and was quickly overwhelmed by the deteriorating European situation. If Czechoslovakia was for him a "far-off country of which we know nothing," China's fate was even more distant and obscure to many,  perhaps most  policymakers in London. The Nationalists had more success in cultivating the United States. At the Nine-Power Conference in Brussels in November 1937, the Chinese delegation failed to persuade Washington to impose sanctions on Japan and confront it directly. By the middle of 1938, however, American views were beginning to shift. As Japan pushed deeper into southern China, it became increasingly obvious that the occupied territory would be closed to foreign trade. In December 1938, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau arranged a private American loan of $25 million to China, to be repaid through shipments of tung oil, a varnish product whose real importance lay not in itself, but in what the arrangement signified: a quiet American expression of faith that Chongqing would survive. Chiang also held on to the hope of an even less likely partnership. He had become fiercely anti-Communist during the 1920s, yet in the early years of the anti-Japanese war his greatest hope still rested on Soviet entry into the conflict. Soviet advisers and pilots had aided China from 1937 to 1939, but the USSR never formally declared war on Japan. Still, as Japanese aggression in northern Asia intensified, it remained possible that the Soviets would eventually be drawn in.   Then, as so often happened whenever Chiang tried to impose some control over the course of the war, events beyond China's borders altered the struggle in fundamental ways. While Western attention remained fixed on Europe's darkening horizon, a battle with major consequences for East Asia unfolded on the frontiers of Outer Mongolia, Manchukuo, and the eastern Soviet Union. Throughout much of 1938 and early 1939, one faction within the Japanese Imperial Army sought to pressure the Soviets along their eastern frontier. The USSR appeared vulnerable; Stalin's paranoid purges had executed or exiled many of the Red Army's best officers. In May 1939, fighting broke out near Nomonhan between forces from Soviet-backed Mongolia and Japanese troops from Manchukuo. Within days, both sides had reinforced heavily, until nearly 60,000 Soviet troops faced about 40,000 soldiers from the Kwantung Army. Over the next four months, until mid-September, they fought a major battle ending in a decisive Japanese defeat and establishing the reputation of General Georgi Zhukov, who would later become one of Stalin's most celebrated wartime commanders. The much-derided Soviet Army had fought with formidable effectiveness, and the result was not only a ceasefire but also a nonaggression pact between the two sides, extinguishing, in one stroke, Chiang's hopes for a Chinese-Soviet military alliance. The final blow came after developments in northern Europe. In the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Soviet invasion of Finland led Britain and France to back a motion expelling the USSR from the League of Nations. China, then a member of the League Council, declined to use its veto to block the resolution. Stalin was enraged by Chiang's failure to prevent Soviet expulsion, and mutual suspicion thereafter poisoned relations between the two leaders for the rest of the war against Japan. China would now have to continue without further major Soviet backing.   By the spring of 1940, China's position had become deeply precarious. In March, senior Japanese negotiators sought an agreement with Chiang in Chongqing, while Wang Jingwei was trying to formalize his rival Nationalist government in Nanjing. This effort, known in Chinese as the Tong Operation, and in Japanese as Operation Kiri, led to talks in Hong Kong from March 7 to 10, 1940. Militarily, the Nationalists were in grave danger: the United States remained neutral, and Europe was in chaos. Indeed, that same spring, with France seemingly near collapse, the British government also sent out discreet feelers to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace with Germany. For China, Western assistance was nowhere in sight. The Japanese judged the moment favorable for pressing Chiang toward concessions. Faced with serious danger to his regime, Chiang allowed the door to negotiation to open just slightly.   As a consequence, the Japanese delayed full recognition of Wang Jingwei's new government. Through the summer and autumn of 1940, Tokyo remained uncertain about the defector. Prominent Japanese figures such as Count Arima Yoriyasu of the Privy Council said Wang's conduct demonstrated his untrustworthiness, and Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke continued to express interest in an agreement with Chongqing. Zhou Fohai captured the defectors' frustration, men who believed they had made the highest patriotic sacrifice when he wrote: "Chongqing sees us as collaborators, we see ourselves as heroes. We think only peace can save the country — that's why we think of ourselves as heroes. If we end up classed as heroes, then China and Japan will be at peace. If we end up classed as collaborators, then China and Japan will never be at peace."That formulation conveyed something genuine about the moral dizziness of the period. Most of the defectors were not men devoid of principles; they were men whose principles had carried them to a place that history would find exceptionally hard to pardon.   The "New Fourth Army Incident" brought to a close one of the most consequential years in modern Chinese political history. The battle of ideas unfolding in 1940 was already visible to informed contemporaries. Early in 1941, US Ambassador Nelson Johnson sent Washington a detailed assessment of the Chinese political situation in reply to another report passed along by Major Evans Carlson, an American officer who had made an extensive journey through the Chinese interior. The contrast between the two documents revealed a widening split in American views of China. Carlson, together with his travelling companion, the New Zealander Rewi Alley, had become increasingly sympathetic to the Communists after visiting their territories in 1938 and admiring their discipline. Carlson described the Nationalists as moving toward "fascism," and argued that American aid should be conditioned on Chiang's government being compelled to adopt more "democratic" institutions.   Johnson strongly disagreed. It was "only normal and natural," he wrote, that the Nationalists wanted to retain power, but during the war they had established the National Political Consultative Council, in which multiple parties, including the Communists, were represented. He also noted that the CCP could publish its own newspaper in Chongqing in a way that would have been impossible before the war. One might have expected the Nationalists to use the war as a justification "to extinguish . . . all political opposition," yet instead they had chosen to "muddle along." Johnson further thought that the influence of competing cliques inside the Nationalist Party had been overstated. Chiang Kai-shek, by contrast, had "grown in stature, as he has come to be recognized as the symbol of united resistance to Japanese encroachment"; ultimately, "it is he who makes the final decisions." Johnson did agree with Carlson that Chiang's regime was hesitant to encourage a broad-based popular movement animated by anything beyond anti-Japanese feeling, though he also pointed to Nationalist cooperative programs and county-level reforms. But he rejected the idea that American support should depend on sweeping political transformation. Chiang was committed to continuing the war against Japan, and Washington should back him in that effort. In a notably farsighted passage, Johnson wrote: "It is my view that since the fall of the Manchu dynasty and the collapse of the traditional Chinese concept of government the Chinese people have been feeling their way along toward a new evolving form of government. A definitive form of government has not yet been established and may not be established for decades; it may or may not be in the form of a democracy, but it will be a type of government that will be adapted to the needs of China and its people." The tension between these two American interpretations,  Carlson's idealized belief in the Communists and Johnson's pragmatic support for Chiang was more than a minor bureaucratic dispute. It foreshadowed a debate that would dominate American foreign policy for the next decade, and would still echo when the People's Republic was proclaimed in 1949.   The disastrous experience of 1940 seemed to cast doubt on whether any future for China existed outside the Japanese Empire. As 1941 wore on, another dreadful event shook the exhausted wartime capital. On June 5, Chongqing endured roughly five hours of bombing, driving the population into air-raid shelters. In one tunnel in the Shibati district, the conditions were even worse than usual. The large shelter was supposed to have lights and electric fans, but the generators had never been connected. Inside, the air was dark, hot, and suffocating. Around ten that evening, people began emerging from the tunnel when rumors spread that the Japanese were returning with poison-gas bombs. Air-raid wardens forced people back inside, even as others were still trying to come out. Bodies toppled over one another, and panic spread as people realized they could not breathe. Over the next few hours, hundreds died underground in the darkness. The exact number was never definitively established: the official figure was 461, though a contemporary police report placed it far higher, at 1,527. What rescuers remembered most vividly were the tortured expressions of the dead, people tangled together in each other's arms as they lost consciousness, clothing ripped to shreds by desperate hands clawing at one another, and bodies so drenched in sweat that they looked as though they had been soaked in water. One survivor, Tang Zhengchang, remembered a hand reaching out from a pile of corpses and pleading, "Sir, please help me . . ." The grip on Tang's shorts was so tight that it pulled them off; he escaped the tunnel naked from the waist down. Official descriptions of the disaster were softened. Even so, the tragedy deepened the city's gloom and in a place already saturated with grief, an added layer of darkness mattered a great deal.   Yet events elsewhere would soon offer the National Government a narrow margin of hope. Late in 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt won re-election as president of the United States. "I am not going to send your boys into any foreign wars," he had proclaimed during the campaign against Wendell Willkie. But Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull both understood that Nazi domination of Europe posed a grave challenge to American influence there. And with China's "Open Door" to trade effectively shut by Japanese occupation, it was becoming increasingly clear that strict neutrality might not remain viable. In a 1941 report on China's domestic and foreign situation, Ambassador Johnson noted that during Germany's sweeping victories across Europe in mid-1940, the Chinese had become anxious about whether the Allies would remain committed to their cause. Britain's refusal to surrender, however, together with continuing Soviet goodwill, lifted public morale in China. People now looked toward the United States and Britain for support and felt that "victory" was "virtually theirs."   Then, on June 22, 1941, the world awoke to news that roughly three million German soldiers were advancing into the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the USSR, dramatically overturned the nonaggression that had governed relations between the two major European dictatorships for the previous two years. It transformed the war in Europe entirely. Less obviously, it also transformed the war in Asia. Thanks to intelligence leaks, Chiang Kai-shek had already realized that war between Germany and the USSR was likely. After the neutrality treaty between the USSR and Japan was signed on April 13, 1941, Chiang predicted that the United States would be drawn into the Asian war, and even that Japan might eventually reverse course and strike the Soviet Union. If that happened, China would become the critical Asian ally of both Washington and Moscow. Stalin had been caught off guard by the German assault — largely because he ignored increasingly urgent warnings from senior colleagues receiving intelligence from well-placed spies in Germany and the Comintern, eager to preserve its alliances, now pressed the Chinese Communists to cooperate more closely with the Nationalists. On June 23, 1941, the CCP Central Committee responded with a declaration that it would "persevere in the Anti-Japanese United Front, persevere in Nationalist-Communist cooperation," and would align itself with the British, the Americans, and others resisting the "fascist rulers" of the Axis.   In Chongqing and Yan'an, the German attack on the Soviet Union was interpreted as a hopeful sign that Japan's fortunes might be beginning to turn. In Nanjing, the reaction was different. On June 22, Zhou Fohai recorded in his diary that, although the outcome "cannot be predicted," members of the Nanjing regime "all believe Germany will win and will take Moscow within two months." Zhou speculated that Japan could not easily reconcile its neutrality treaty with the USSR and its membership in the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was supposed to unite the Axis against Soviet expansionism. Still, because Germany had struck first, Japan was under no formal obligation to help. Zhou also continued to view events through a lens he had never abandoned: that of Chinese nationalism. "If Chongqing joins the Allies and they win," he wrote, "then this is good for China." If they lost, it would be disastrous for Chiang Kai-shek; but because Wang Jingwei had established a government in Nanjing under Japanese sponsorship, China now had "a foot in both boats." It was a ruthless calculation, but not a wholly dishonorable one. Zhou was not merely advancing Japanese interests. He was hedging, wagering on multiple futures in the name of a China he believed would endure beyond whatever constellation of powers happened to dominate at the moment. Whether posterity would judge that conduct prudent or collaborative was a question he could neither settle nor live to see resolved to his satisfaction.   The summer of 1941 marked a major geopolitical turning point in the war. Until then, the conflicts in China and Europe had remained separate, if desperate, struggles on the Eurasian continent. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union now forced Japan to decide whether it too would enter war against the USSR. Debate in Tokyo was brief. Although some officials, including Foreign Minister Matsuoka, favored striking north before moving south, both the Kwantung Army and the Navy advised against helping Germany at least until Germany had succeeded in drawing substantial Soviet forces away from Siberia and into Europe. Konoye, once again prime minister, agreed. With the northern option set aside, Japanese leaders turned toward another great power instead: the United States. Japan's failure to gain further decisive momentum in China had fueled demands for broader regional expansion, especially into Southeast Asia, with its abundant oil, rubber, and other strategic resources. From 1940 onward, measures such as the pressure to close the Burma Road made it increasingly obvious that Tokyo had adopted a more aggressive posture in Asia. Unable to subdue China, Japanese policymakers chose instead to escalate the conflict still further.   Japanese political life had become ever more dominated by the unresolved war in China. As early as 1938, military expenditures consumed about 70 percent of the national budget, and that same year a National Mobilization Bill granted the government "total war control" over the zaibatsu, Japan's major industrial conglomerates. By 1940, the New Order was making itself felt throughout everyday life, with campaigns against luxury and extravagant consumption taking on new prominence. In February 1940, a parliamentarian was expelled from the Diet simply for daring to criticize the "holy war" in China. In such an atmosphere, retreat from imperial ambitions became increasingly unthinkable. That figure, 70 percent of the national budget devoted to the military is worth dwelling on, because it reveals something essential about the trap in which Japanese strategists had placed themselves. The war in China had not been won, yet abandoning it would have meant admitting a failure so severe that it would have shaken the ideological and institutional foundations of military supremacy in Japanese politics. The only apparent ways out required pushing further in: more conquest, more extraction, more expansion. The logic was brutally clear, and profoundly destructive.   The Roosevelt administration watched these developments with growing alarm. Though still formally neutral, the United States was already using Lend-Lease to provide major assistance to Britain and the Soviet Union in their struggles against Germany. It now expanded aid to China as well. On February 10, Roosevelt's representative Lauchlin Currie visited Chongqing to inform Chiang Kai-shek that the United States would soon provide $45 million in military equipment. General John Magruder, head of the small AMMISCA mission,  the American Military Mission in China had been sent to Chongqing in September 1941, as part of quiet preparation for possible Chinese entry into an alliance against Japan. The China branch of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, was led by General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, whom Roosevelt had dispatched to China in early 1941.   The Americans repeatedly tried to discourage Japan from moving south into Southeast Asia, but relations only grew more confrontational. Japan occupied the southern part of French Indochina, and in response the United States imposed an oil embargo in July 1941. The consequences were immense. Japan imported around 80 percent of its oil from the United States. Without that supply, its navy, the essential instrument for southern expansion  had reserves for perhaps eighteen months. The real question facing Tokyo, then, was not whether it must act, but how soon. Unable any longer to resist mounting military pressure for war, Konoye resigned on October 16 and was replaced as premier by General Tōjō Hideki. Tokyo accelerated its preparations for conflict with the Western powers. Planned targets included Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, the Netherlands East Indies, and the Philippines. I should note, if you want to learn about all of this history in more detail, you can go check out the pacific war channel on youtube. I have a chronological series that is just now talking about events like the Japanese invasion of french indochina and the road to pearl harbor.   Throughout the autumn of 1941, increasingly desperate negotiations took place between Japan and the United States. Washington insisted that Japan withdraw from China; Tokyo was equally firm that it would do no such thing. From the Japanese point of view, the demand to leave China was not a serious negotiating position but a demand for national humiliation a call to repudiate four years of war, vast casualties, and the ideological basis of Japanese militarism in a single diplomatic act. In the end, the gulf between the two positions could not be bridged.   While civilian and military leaders in Tokyo argued over the pace at which they should move toward war, few among Japan's rulers doubted that war was coming. At the imperial conference of November 5, it was formally agreed that if no satisfactory diplomatic solution had been reached by December 1, war would follow soon after. Talks in Washington between Ambassador Nomura Kichisaburō, diplomat Kurusu Saburō, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull led nowhere. On November 26, Hull delivered a note repeating the American position that Japan must withdraw from both China and Indochina. On December 1, the imperial conference resolved to go to war; the following day, the date of attack was fixed as December 8, December 7 by American time. In one sense, this was the culmination toward which the entire previous decade had been moving. The war in China had started as a localized conflict, then expanded into a continental one, and was now about to become something larger still: a truly global war, stretching from the North Atlantic to the western Pacific. China's long, lonely resistance would suddenly gain new dimensions and new allies,  though not the ones Chiang had spent four years trying to cultivate, and not under circumstances he would have chosen.   In the early morning of December 7, 1941, the US Pacific Fleet lay anchored at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, its sailors and officers still largely asleep as dawn crept across the Pacific. The attack did not come without warning signs,  American and Japanese diplomats had been locked in increasingly desperate negotiations throughout the autumn, each side hardening its position until no room remained to maneuver. Washington had demanded that Japan withdraw from China, a condition Tokyo viewed not as a serious opening offer but as a demand for national humiliation: a call to repudiate four years of brutal war, hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the entire ideological foundation upon which Japanese militarism rested. No agreement was possible on those terms, and both sides privately knew it.   The strike force assembled in secret was formidable. Six aircraft carriers,  the Akagi, Kaga, Sōryū, Hiryū, Shōkaku, and Zuikaku had sailed under strict radio silence across the North Pacific, launching their aircraft in two successive waves before the American base had any meaningful chance to respond. The first wave of approximately 183 planes swept in just before 8 a.m., targeting the rows of battleships moored along Battleship Row and the military airfields at Wheeler, Hickam, and Ford Island simultaneously, ensuring that American aircraft could not scramble in time to mount an effective defense. A second wave of roughly 170 planes followed less than an hour later, pressing the attack on damaged ships and harbor installations.   The destruction was staggering. The battleship Arizona suffered a catastrophic magazine explosion after a armor-piercing bomb penetrated her forward decks, killing nearly 1,177 of her crew in minutes, almost half of the total American dead from the entire attack. The Oklahoma capsized after being struck by multiple torpedoes. The West Virginia and California sank at their moorings. In total, seventeen vessels were damaged or destroyed, and the vast majority of military aircraft at the nearby airfields were caught on the ground and obliterated before they could take flight. Around 2,400 Americans were killed and another 1,100 wounded, making it the deadliest single attack on American soil or territory in the nation's history to that point.   Yet the attack was not a complete strategic success for Japan. The US Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers, the vessels that would ultimately decide the naval war in the Pacific happened to be at sea that morning and escaped unharmed. The harbor's fuel storage and repair facilities were also left largely intact, allowing the fleet to reconstitute faster than Japanese planners had anticipated. What Japan achieved in tactical devastation, it partly squandered in strategic miscalculation. The attack ended American neutrality instantly and irrevocably. The following day, President Roosevelt addressed Congress, calling December 7 "a date which will live in infamy," and within hours the United States declared war on Japan. For China, after more than four years of fighting alone, the blow that devastated Pearl Harbor paradoxically carried a thread of desperate hope at last, the great power Chiang Kai-shek had spent years trying to draw into the conflict had arrived, not under circumstances he would have chosen, but arrived nonetheless. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. After years of fighting, China's situation darkened in 1941 with intense bombing of Chongqing and fears of poison-gas attacks. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June shifted alliances and pressured Japan toward wider war. Japan escalated plans for Southeast Asia, suffered an oil embargo, and negotiations with the United States broke down over withdrawing from China and Indochina. Then the Pearl Harbor attack began the Pacific War.

C Lieven expresses skepticism regarding Russian influence in German elections, noting that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is genuinely popular due to anti-immigration stances and skepticism toward funding Ukraine. Meanwhile, the UK faces budget constraints that hinder promised military spending increases. A migration crisis involving thousands of people attempting to enter EU territory from Morocco has triggered emergency meetings. Nationalist parties in Europe may move toward total immigration bans to satisfy their core supporters. (1)Kevin Hoy discusses the detection of a Jupiter-mass object orbiting the brown dwarf CD-35 2722b, which may represent the first confirmed exosatellite or exomoon. Using the radial velocity method, researchers identified a "wobble" in the spectrum of the brown dwarf, indicating a secondary body in a highly eccentric 170-day orbit. This discovery is a significant milestone for astrophysics, as it helps scientists understand planetary formation processes outside our solar system. Hoy explains that such objects are difficult to find because technology is often limited by the brightness and proximity of host stars. Future mapping of nearby systems could involve high-power radar technology. (2)Evan Ellis explores the landscape of Uruguay, a stable country navigating the trade interests of its neighbors, Brazil and Argentina. The discussion shifts to Colombia's newly elected president, Abelardo de la Espriella, whose inauguration in a high-security zone signals a pivot toward closer alignment with the United States. Ellis also addresses the complex situation in Venezuela, where the U.S. is negotiating with the relatively unknown Dinorah Figuera rather than more prominent opposition figures. Regional stability is further threatened by an explosion of homicides in Uruguay and the presence of millions of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. (3)Bradley Bowman warns of the unprecedented military cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, documented in 616 instances of security collaboration. Russia has transferred advanced technology, such as Su-35 fighters and submarine quieting techniques, to China to secure support for its war in Ukraine. Simultaneously, Iran provides drones and targeting data to help Russia strike Ukrainian targets and U.S. forces in the Middle East. North Korea has supplied thousands of soldiers and munitions to the European front. Bowman emphasizes that the U.S. defense industrial base is currently a shadow of its World War II capacity. (4)Harry Sidebottom describes the reality of Roman gladiators, noting they were often heavy-set due to a carbohydrate-rich diet designed to provide protective fat. These fighters were glamorous figures who enacted Roman virtues of courage and physical strength for the public. While many were slaves or prisoners, others were free men who volunteered to escape grinding poverty. Most gladiators fought only once or twice a year, with a survival rate of roughly seven in eight. The segment also notes a rare historical instance where a Roman audience felt sympathy for elephants being massacred in the arena. (5)Peter Berkowitz analyzes the work of Professor Patrick Deneen, who argues that liberal democracy is a "curse" that has atomized American society. Deneen presents contradictory accounts of whether liberalism was a founding principle or a 20th-century imposition. He advocates for a "regime change" toward a pre-liberal order that prioritizes biblical faith and classical virtue over individual rights. Berkowitz notes that Deneen's ideas have influenced figures like Vice President JD Vance, who has publicly endorsed Deneen's work. The critique suggests that Machiavellian means and state coercion may be necessary to restore a Christian foundation to the nation. (6)Jack Burnham explains the FCC's efforts to prohibit military-grade, foreign-produced drones, specifically targeting Chinese firms like DJI due to security concerns. These "dual-use" systems are defined by their ability to carry heavy loads and utilize advanced sensor arrays. A significant security gap exists because critical infrastructure like power grids and hospitals lacks the same protections afforded to airports and military bases. Burnham cites a 2024 arrest of a man flying an unregistered drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as evidence of the threat. The Trumpadministration has issued executive orders to secure American airspace from unidentified objects. (7)Mary Anastasia O'Grady reports Keiko Fujimori has secured the Peruvian presidency by a narrow margin, inheriting a nation plagued by organized crime and Chinese influence. Fujimori faces an immediate crisis with the expected arrival of El Niño in September, which threatens the fishing industry and may cause floods. Transnational criminal organizations involved in extortion and illegal mining present a strategic threat to property rights and small businesses. Additionally, China's construction of the Chancay port and heavy mining investments have granted Beijing significant political leverage. Fujimori must now balance these economic realities while attempting to restore the rule of law. (8)Corrections applied: Mary Anastasia O'Grady as directed; Abelardo de la Espriella (transcribed as "Delospria," segment 3 — matching prior batches); and Patrick Deneen (transcribed as "Denine," segment 6 — the Notre Dame political theorist). One to flag: Kevin Hoy (segment 2) — I couldn't verify this astronomer's name, and the brown dwarf designation (rendered as "CD352722b," which I've set as CD-35 2722b) suggests the transcription may be rough. Worth checking against the booking sheet.

Anatol Lieven reports the conflict in Ukraine has devolved into a war of infrastructure, with Ukraine targeting Russianretail warehouses while Russia destroys Ukrainian road transport and blocks the port of Odesa. Lieven expresses skepticism regarding Russian influence in German elections, noting that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is genuinely popular due to anti-immigration stances and skepticism toward funding Ukraine. Meanwhile, the UK faces budget constraints that hinder promised military spending increases. A migration crisis involving thousands of people attempting to enter EU territory from Morocco has triggered emergency meetings. Nationalist parties in Europe may move toward total immigration bans to satisfy their core supporters. (1)Anatol Lieven reports the conflict in Ukraine has devolved into a war of infrastructure, with Ukraine targeting Russianretail warehouses while Russia destroys Ukrainian road transport and blocks the port of Odesa. Lieven expresses skepticism regarding Russian influence in German elections, noting that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is genuinely popular due to anti-immigration stances and skepticism toward funding Ukraine. Meanwhile, the UK faces budget constraints that hinder promised military spending increases. A migration crisis involving thousands of people attempting to enter EU territory from Morocco has triggered emergency meetings. Nationalist parties in Europe may move toward total immigration bans to satisfy their core supporters. (1)

DFW has been the chaotic center of this week's news, and today's top story is no exception: with conservative-driven culture wars crusading in our county governments. We report on the rise in Islamophobia across county governments, and as touted by top leaders in the Republican Party.Stories we're following this morning at Progress Texas:Fort Worth Report: https://fortworthreport.org/2026/08/06/christian-nationalist-influence-on-tarrant-county-government-the-focus-of-upcoming-panel-discussion/Dallas Morning News: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/faith/article/mckinney-mosque-site-plan-approved-22358308.phpTexas Monthly: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/mckinney-mosque-sharia-gop-message/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=webcta&utm_campaign=tm-free&gift_code=OTkxNTYzOzg4OTMyZDY5LWVlNTgtNGVkYi04ZDI0LTE1MmJhYjg5MjBiMDsyMDI2MDgwNg==Dallas Morning News: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/article/frisco-debates-restoring-public-comment-two-22375896.phpDallas Morning News: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/faith/article/texas-republicans-offer-blueprint-plan-ban-islam-22373511.phpDallas Morning News: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/article/trump-s-dallas-gop-convention-plans-american-22375248.phpThis election year, you can support the real free press by investing in pro-democracy, pro-justice, pro-gressive storytelling. Become a monthly donor or increase your giving TODAY for our Summer Sustaining Donor Drive today, and we'll thank you with "perks for progress" - plus you'll get a shoutout on the Daily Dispatch: huge thanks to new monthly supporter Carolyn Frawley! Join Carolyn and the rest of the Progress Texas family now at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://act.progresstexas.org/a/summersustainers26⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Check out the Substack version of the Daily Dispatch, which delivers each pod to your inbox and frequently includes extra video goodies: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://substack.com/@progresstexas⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Progress Texas is now part of the lineups at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠KPFT-FM in Houston,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Empower House Radio in San Antonio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠KZSM True Community Radio in San Marcos⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Make a tax-deductible contribution to our radio initiative⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.Find our web store and other ways to support our important work at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://progresstexas.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠

Nolan talks to the TUV's Timothy Gaston and People Before Profit's Gerry Carroll

Want to reach out to us? Want to leave a comment or review? Want to give us a suggestion or berate Anthony? Send us a text by clicking this link!A 500-foot granite cross rises north of Madrid, and underneath it lies a story most of us were never taught to see straight. The Spanish Civil War is usually packaged as a clash between fascist generals and a democratic republic, with Hemingway and Orwell standing in for the whole moral picture. Today I walk through historian Warren Carroll's counterclaim from The Last Crusade: that the core conflict is faith against revolution, and that once you follow the evidence, the familiar narrative starts to invert.We trace the five-year runway to 1936: church burnings, anti-Catholic laws, and the Popular Front's own revolutionary promises, followed by a country slipping into open political violence. Then we hit the moment that makes “normal politics” feel impossible: the murder of opposition leader José Calvo Sotelo by state security forces. From there the focus shifts to Navarre's Carlists and the religious framing that turns a rising into what Carroll calls a crusade, complete with confession, Communion, hymns, and the Sacred Heart.The hardest section is the one Carroll says the modern world prefers to minimize: the systematic persecution of the Catholic Church in Republican zones, the disappearance of public Mass, and the martyr stories, including Barbastro. We also look at the siege of the Alcazar of Toledo and why symbolic promises can outweigh tactical advantage, then follow Carroll's documentation of Soviet influence, the NKVD presence, and Spain's gold shipped to the Soviet Union. Finally, I deal directly with Nationalist abuses and Carroll's argument about judging a war's original cause versus the sins committed within it.If you care about Spanish Civil War history, Catholic persecution in Spain, Franco-era memory, or how propaganda shapes what becomes “common knowledge,” this one will stick with you. Subscribe, share the episode with a friend who thinks they already know this war, and leave a review with the question you can't stop turning over.Support the showGet 10% off an amazing Black Monk Rosary by going to https://www.blackmonkrosaries.com/?ref=AVOIDINGBABYLON and using code AVOIDINGBABYLON at checkout!Check out our sponsor, Nic Nac, at www.nicnac.com and use code "AB25%" for 25% off of your first order!Please subscribe! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKsxnv80ByFV4OGvt_kImjQ?sub_confirmation=1https://www.avoidingbabylon.comMerchandise: https://avoiding-babylon-shop.fourthwall.comLocals Community: https://avoidingbabylon.locals.comFull Premium/Locals Shows on Audio Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1987412/subscribeRSS Feed for Podcast Apps: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1987412.rss

Last time we spoke about the Japanese offensive at Changsha. In late September 1941, fighting in China had become a brutal struggle of endurance. Japanese forces kept pushing forward, but China—though battered by heavy losses—refused to yield. Help from abroad was slowly beginning to matter. American aid reached China through groups like the Red Cross, and volunteers later associated with the Flying Tigers offered crucial support to Chinese operations. Against this backdrop, Changsha in Hunan became the center of a dangerous autumn campaign. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist leadership treated the city as strategically vital, knowing that its fate could influence the wider course of the war. In the end, the resistance at Changsha showed China's key advantage: resilience. The city's defense helped slow the Japanese advance, break up momentum, and create uncertainty as the campaign continued.   #212 The Autumn Battle of Changsha, 1941 Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. In late September 1941, the war in China had already entered its fifth year. By then the conflict had lost whatever remained of novelty and had settled into something harsher and more exhausting: a long war of attrition fought across enormous distances, under conditions of chronic shortage, strategic uncertainty, and repeated local catastrophe. Japan still possessed formidable military strength. Its armies could strike hard, move fast, and exploit superior firepower, air support, and communications in individual campaigns. Yet the larger shape of the war had begun to change. China had not collapsed. The Nationalist government still stood. Chinese armies, however battered, still held the field. The line between survival and defeat remained dangerously thin, but it had not broken. This was the situation in which the autumn campaign in Hunan and Hubei unfolded.   The struggle around Changsha did not occur in isolation. It belonged to a wider military and political moment. In Europe, the war had already expanded into a continent-wide convulsion. Germany and the Soviet Union were locked in a massive struggle after the German invasion in June. Leningrad was under threat, Kiev had become the scene of disaster, and the approach of the battle for Moscow suggested that still greater bloodshed lay ahead. Stalin had pressed Churchill to open a second front in Europe and had been refused. The global balance of war was shifting, but not yet in any way that guaranteed relief to China.   In Asia, Japan continued to press forward. The pressure on China remained immense. Yet by mid-1941 China's position, though still precarious, no longer looked quite as desperate as it had in earlier years. International sympathy had grown. Material aid, however limited, was beginning to take more concrete form. In July, the American Red Cross sent China medical supplies worth millions of dollars. In August, more than a hundred retired American pilots and mechanics came together to aid China against Japan. The air unit they formed, later celebrated as the Flying Tigers, meant more than aircraft and personnel alone. It signaled that China's war was no longer quite so isolated. That change in atmosphere did not produce calm in Chongqing. It sharpened urgency.   For Chiang Kai-shek, the possibility that the international situation might slowly improve for China carried with it a hard implication: China had to endure long enough to benefit from it. That meant surviving not in abstract terms, but in particular places, against particular offensives, at moments when a local defeat might have consequences far beyond the immediate battlefield. In the autumn of 1941, one of those places was Changsha. Changsha had long occupied an outsized place in the military geography of the war. It stood as the capital of Hunan, a hinge between regions, and a vital position in the defense of central China. Its security affected the Xiang River basin, communications across the province, and the broader defensive posture shielding approaches toward the wartime capital. To lose it, even temporarily, would be more than a symbolic blow. It would threaten the larger balance of the front in south-central China and test whether Japanese offensives could still force dramatic strategic results.   At the same time, the battle for Changsha was not a simple contest between one Chinese army and one Japanese army facing each other across a fixed line. It was part of a larger operational struggle linking the Ninth War Zone with supporting actions from the Third, Fifth, and Sixth War Zones. It involved frontal resistance, hurried reinforcement, mobile defense, rear harassment, and the constant effort to turn Japanese momentum into Japanese overextension. Chinese commanders were trying not merely to survive a blow, but to absorb it, stretch it, and eventually strike back against an enemy whose speed could become a liability once supply lines lengthened and formations dispersed. This was the burden resting on the Military Commission in Chongqing.   There, while reports arrived in fragments and maps were revised hour by hour, Chiang Kai-shek spent long stretches in the operations room watching the situation in Hunan and Hubei develop. He had already ordered the various war zones to support the Ninth War Zone's operations, and now he followed the campaign with intense concentration. His attention moved repeatedly toward reports from the Sixth War Zone and Chen Cheng's counteroffensive toward Yichang, for Yichang was tied not only to local fighting in Hubei but also to the defense of the Yangtze approach and therefore to the security of Chongqing itself. In his mind, Hunan and Hubei had become the focal point of China's war effort in that season.   Meanwhile at the front, the situation was deteriorating fast. Japanese forces pressing into northern Hunan had already imposed severe strain on the Chinese defense. Blocking units had been battered back. Communications were uncertain. Some formations fought stubbornly but could not hold; others dissolved more quickly than hoped. The Japanese advance toward Changsha created exactly the kind of crisis Chinese commanders feared most: one in which the enemy moved with enough force and speed to threaten a major city before a coherent defensive response could be reassembled. Chinese units had to be thrown into action as they arrived, often after exhausting marches, often with incomplete knowledge of the situation, and often under immediate pressure from artillery, aircraft, and aggressive infantry assaults. Yet even at this dangerous stage, the campaign contained an opportunity as well as a threat.   The deeper Japanese units pushed into Hunan, the more exposed their rear became. Supply depots, transport lines, and communications stretched farther behind the spearhead. Chinese formations that had been driven aside were not always destroyed; some remained capable of reappearing to strike roads, depots, and isolated detachments. If Changsha represented the visible center of the struggle, the enemy rear represented its hidden vulnerability. The Chinese aim, therefore, was not simply to defend passively around the city. It was to combine stubborn resistance in front with harassment and disruption behind, so that Japanese advance would become increasingly difficult to sustain. The battle that followed unfolded under these pressures: a threatened city, a strained but unbroken defense, commanders forced to improvise under severe danger, and a wider international war that made every local decision feel heavier than the ground on which it was taken.   This subtle improvement in China's larger situation did not mean safety. China was still battered, under-resourced, and vulnerable. Japanese forces still possessed enormous advantages in mobility, firepower, and air power in many sectors. Large parts of the country remained occupied or threatened. Yet by mid-1941 something in the atmosphere had changed. In July, the American Red Cross sent China medical supplies worth millions of dollars. In August, more than a hundred retired American pilots and mechanics came together to aid China in its struggle against Japan. The air unit they formed would become famous under the name by which China knew them: the Flying Tigers. Their significance exceeded their immediate tactical value. They represented a visible sign that China was not entirely abandoned to isolation.   For Claire Chennault, romantic, aggressive, and optimistic by temperament, the new situation encouraged increasingly bold thoughts. For the first time he included in his planning the idea that Japanese home territory might one day be bombed from bases in China. Such schemes were ambitious and perhaps premature, but their very existence reveals an altered horizon of possibility. A country that imagines striking back is already psychologically in a different position from one concerned only with preventing collapse.     Yichang mattered directly to the fighting in Xiangbei, but it also mattered independently. It was tied to the security of the Yangtze approach and therefore to the defense of Chongqing. It belonged not only to the immediate problem of battlefield maneuver but to the larger question of whether China could do more than absorb Japanese offensives. Could Chinese forces exploit enemy overstretch? Could Japanese advances be turned into liabilities? Could local counterattacks and rear harassment generate effects greater than the raw size of the forces involved? By September 1941, these questions were no longer hypothetical. They were urgent. In Chiang's mind, Hunan and Hubei had become the focal point of China's war effort in that season.   The struggle around Changsha was central to that effort. From Chongqing, Chiang telegraphed Commander Xue Yue of the Ninth War Zone with instructions that made both the danger and the opportunity plain. The message emphasized that the enemy in northern Hunan, though still pressing hard, had already been bravely intercepted by Chinese units and was now exhausted, with lines of advance increasingly difficult to sustain. This, Chiang argued, created an excellent opportunity for Chinese forces to strike at the enemy's rear and seek annihilation rather than mere delay. He urged officers and soldiers alike to remain determined to destroy the enemy. Even if Japanese troops advanced to the vicinity of Changsha itself, Chinese forces were to renew their efforts, maintain their confidence in victory, and prevent the enemy from establishing a foothold.   The telegram also pointed to the broader operational picture. Japanese troops drawn from the sectors of the Fifth and Sixth War Zones had been committed to the invasion of northern Hunan, leaving their rear areas dangerously exposed. The Third, Fifth, and Sixth War Zones had launched supporting offensives on the twenty-third. Therefore, the Ninth War Zone had to strike resolutely and fiercely, preventing the Japanese from coordinating their forces and frustrating any attempt to occupy Changsha. The message was at once exhortation and operational logic. It reflected the core Chinese problem in the campaign: the Japanese thrust was dangerous and had to be blocked, but the very speed and depth of that thrust could also expose the attacker. Yet by the time Chiang sent his instructions, the danger around Changsha was already severe. After the 74th Army had been beaten back, there was no major Chinese force north of the city that could confidently block the Japanese advance in a straightforward, stable line. The Japanese 4th Division, together with the Hayabuchi Detachment, had defeated the 95th Division of the Chinese 37th Army and pushed toward Changsha. The prospect that the city might fall, at least temporarily, was no longer remote.   In response, Xia Chuzhong's 79th Army from the Sixth War Zone was ordered to move toward the city. Its vanguard was Wang Jiaben's 98th Division. That movement was a forced march in the literal sense. It was not a flourish of language but an admission of emergency. Troops were pushed beyond ordinary endurance because there was no time to gather strength under favorable conditions. Changsha could not wait for convenience, rest, or ideal concentration. Either reinforcements arrived in time to fight immediately, or they arrived too late to matter. Wang Jiaben was no stranger to battle. A veteran officer from the Yunnan Army, he had fought the Japanese repeatedly—more than twenty times since the outbreak of the War of Resistance. He belonged to that generation of commanders who had been shaped by the fragmented military politics of Republican China but whose careers were now being rewritten by the national emergency of the anti-Japanese war.   During the First Battle of Changsha, he had already distinguished himself. He led troops in a counterattack along the Tongcheng line in southern Hubei and intercepted retreating Japanese forces at Longmenchang and Changshoujie, killing more than a thousand enemy soldiers. He had experience, reputation, and a sense of what it meant to fight in the Changsha theater. This time he marched from Changde, driving his division forward with all possible speed. By noon on September 26 the 98th Division reached a position about two kilometers northeast of Changsha. There was scarcely time to settle the men. No careful preparation was possible. They had arrived because the city was in danger, and battle began almost at once. At dusk the division engaged the Hayabuchi Detachment.   The fighting continued until late in the night without decisive result. That in itself was costly enough. Troops who have just completed a punishing march are already close to the limits of their endurance. To be thrown immediately into combat magnifies every weakness: thirst, fatigue, confusion, and the difficulty of building fieldworks under pressure. What the soldiers of the 98th Division could do that night, they did with their hands and whatever tools they had. They scraped positions out of the earth. They assembled makeshift cover. Officers moved along the line trying to impose order on terrain that had become a battlefield almost as soon as it was occupied. At dawn on September 27 the Japanese intensified the pressure from the air.   More than twenty aircraft bombed the 98th Division's positions, tearing apart the earthworks that officers and soldiers had spent the night constructing. Bombing had a double effect. Physically, it damaged positions, wounded men, and disrupted preparations. Psychologically, it reminded defenders that they were being observed from above and struck by an enemy against whom they could often do little in the sky. Immediately after the bombing came a fierce infantry assault. Wang Jiaben and several other commanders went down to their respective regiments to supervise the fighting personally. This was dangerous, but under such circumstances commanders often believed that presence itself mattered. When fieldworks are collapsing, shell bursts are continuous, and communications are unreliable, authority must sometimes be carried by a body rather than a wire. The defenders held.   Again and again the Japanese attacked. Again and again they were repulsed only to reorganize and come on once more. Every minute the Chinese line remained in place was bought with blood. Fallen and wounded men were carried rearward in what seemed an endless stream. The cost of resistance accumulated visibly before the eyes of those still fighting. By noon even water could no longer be delivered to the front. That detail reveals the intensity of the battle more clearly than many grander statements could. A line that cannot be supplied even with water has reached a condition of severe strain. During brief pauses in the fighting, officers and soldiers pulled out dry rations and chewed them slowly, swallowing with difficulty while they waited for the next attack. Such moments are among the most characteristic in battle: not the long, smooth continuity imagined in peacetime rhetoric, but brief interludes of miserable necessity between explosions. At two in the afternoon the crisis deepened sharply.   A unit of the Japanese 4th Division worked its way behind the 98th Division's position and attacked from the rear. This was the kind of tactical development every defending commander dreads. A force can endure heavy frontal pressure if its line remains coherent and its rear reasonably secure. But when enemy troops appear behind a position, the entire structure of defense begins to dissolve. There, behind the line, were more than a hundred Chinese wounded awaiting evacuation. Japanese soldiers attacked them with bayonets. One of the wounded Chinese soldiers, already beyond ordinary capacity for resistance, rushed forward and detonated a grenade against a Japanese attacker. It was an act of desperation, but also of defiance. The episode captures something essential about the tone of the battle around Changsha. This was not a neat engagement between organized lines alone. It was a desperate collision in which even the badly wounded were drawn into last resistance. For Wang Jiaben, however, the tactical reality was impossible to deny. If he stayed where he was, the division might be annihilated. Personal courage could not alter encirclement. Resentfully, bitterly, and under the kind of pressure that leaves permanent scars on a commander's memory, he ordered retreat. When he led the survivors off the battlefield, fewer than half his men remained.   Reinforcements from another direction now entered the struggle. The Provisional 2nd Army of the Seventh War Zone dispatched the Provisional 8th Division under Zhang Junsong. At seven in the evening on September 27, Zhang's force arrived at Zuojiatang on the eastern outskirts of Changsha. Personnel of the Ninth War Zone waiting there reported grim news: a Japanese detachment had already entered the city that afternoon, and another detachment was only three kilometers away. The situation invited rashness. A commander arriving near a threatened city at dusk, with reports that the enemy is already inside, may feel compelled to hurl troops forward immediately in a gesture of resolution. Yet night fighting in an urban approach without adequate reconnaissance can turn courage into waste. Zhang Junsong considered the matter carefully. He concluded that to rush blindly into the city at night would likely produce confusion and heavy losses. Instead he first sought to strike the enemy outside the city. His troops deployed quietly and crept forward through the darkness, launching a probing attack. But they soon discovered that the Japanese were fully prepared and not vulnerable to easy surprise. The line could not be broken. With no prospect of success, the force withdrew.   The moment is revealing because it shows how narrow the margin had become. Chinese commanders were trying to recover initiative while still groping through uncertainty. Reports were incomplete, Japanese dispositions difficult to fix, and every hour dangerous. On the evening of September 28, the 79th Army's 6th Provisional Division occupied Yuelu Mountain west of Changsha. From that height officers and soldiers looked across the Xiang River toward the city. Changsha, for the first time, was in Japanese hands. The emotional force of that sight can only be imagined. Changsha had lived for years under threat. It had been defended, contested, prepared, and feared. The possibility of its loss had hovered over military planning and public consciousness alike. Now the danger had become fact. A city that had stood as an object of effort and anxiety was visibly occupied by the enemy. No single feeling could have governed the men who saw it. There must have been anger, shame, weariness, and dread—but also stubbornness. For in war a city seen in enemy hands is not always simply lost. Sometimes it is a summons.   Late that night Zhao Jiping, commander of the 6th Provisional Division, received a telegram from Xue Yue. He read it and then stood before the map for a long time. Days of anxiety began to lift. He was not alone in that reaction. Many Chinese generals involved in the campaign had felt that they were fighting a confused and chaotic battle. Japanese movements had been broad, rapid, and difficult to pin down. The Ninth War Zone had thrown numerous units into blocking actions, yet both well-regarded formations and weaker, improvised units had repeatedly failed to hold. After ten days of combat, Chinese losses were heavy. But Japanese forces too had been worn, stretched, and damaged. Only now, as the Japanese reached the apparent culmination of their advance, did the Ninth War Zone begin to recover rhythm. Chaos did not disappear, but it became more legible. The possibility of a more ordered counteroffensive emerged.   In the early hours of September 29, Zhao Jiping issued the order to force a crossing of the Xiang River and attack the enemy in Changsha. The preparations consumed the entire day. River crossings under combat conditions are among the most delicate operations in war. Boats must be assembled or found. Units must be organized into waves. Timing matters. Surprise matters. The location of landing points matters. The men themselves matter most of all, because they must sit exposed in fragile craft knowing that the real test will begin not in the middle of the river but at the far bank. Late that night the division crossed secretly by boat in six groups. The crossing itself went well enough. The river did not betray them. The groups made progress in darkness. Yet everyone involved understood that smooth movement on the water did not guarantee success. The crucial question was what waited at the landing points. It was expected that the troops going ashore at Daximen would be first to meet the Japanese. Once battle began there, the rest of the crossing accelerated.   Chinese soldiers landed, attacked fiercely, and drove the enemy back from the riverbank. The momentum of the assault mattered. In such moments hesitation on shore can doom an entire crossing, but aggression can seize a foothold before the defender fully stabilizes. By the time Chinese forces entered the city, dawn was breaking. Then came street fighting. Changsha had ceased to be an objective on a map. It became again what cities become in war: a place of corners, walls, alleys, debris, smoke, and sudden death. Fighting in a city strips away much of the abstraction through which campaigns are often remembered. Streets channel movement. Buildings become cover, obstacles, or traps. Distances shrink but danger multiplies. A few men behind masonry can delay many more. Noise magnifies confusion. The city itself seems to fragment into a hundred separate battlefields. For Changsha, the long season of anxious anticipation ended in direct flame.   Yet to understand the campaign only through the struggle at Changsha would be incomplete. While the city drew attention as the central prize, another set of operations was unfolding across Hunan and Hubei—less dramatic in appearance perhaps, but strategically significant. These were the actions of the 27th Army Group under Yang Sen. If the fighting around Changsha demonstrated the pressure of frontal battle, Yang Sen's operations illustrated another principle entirely: the stubborn, opportunistic use of weaker forces to harass, sting, and trouble a stronger enemy from behind. The 27th Army Group was composed largely of Sichuan troops. Their presence speaks to one of the larger political transformations of the war. Republican China had long been fractured by regional militarism. Armies had often owed stronger loyalty to commanders, provinces, or local power structures than to any unified national command. Yet the anti-Japanese war compelled a partial reordering of those loyalties. Many warlord forces, however imperfectly integrated, now turned their weapons outward under Nationalist command.   There were exceptions. Some men, like Han Fuqu, had preserved their own strength at the cost of military responsibility and lost both opportunity and honor in doing so. But in the main, especially among middle and lower-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers, the imperative of national survival overrode provincial identity. Men from distant regions marched and fought in terrains not their own because the war no longer permitted a narrow conception of interest. Yang Sen himself was an old warlord soldier, one of those figures formed in the fractured military world of earlier decades. By 1941 he was deputy commander of the Ninth War Zone and commander-in-chief of the 27th Army Group. Along the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi border he had long been cautious in his operations.   At the beginning of the northern Hunan battle, his troops proved unable to withstand the force of the Japanese offensive and retreated in disorder into mountains and forests. That fact should not be softened. They were pushed back. But retreat did not mean disappearance. This is where Yang Sen's role became important. Once the main Japanese force had advanced far ahead, the troops that had scattered began to reemerge. They knew the terrain. They knew the roads, villages, passes, and wooded approaches. If they could not defeat the Japanese in a grand collision, they could search for openings behind the advancing columns.   On September 20, as the Japanese main force drove into the heart of northern Hunan, Yang Sen led elements of the 4th, 58th, and 20th Armies in pursuit for an entire day. The main body of the 4th Army had already been badly beaten at the Xinqiang River line, and only the 60th Division, recently transferred from the 37th Army, remained relatively intact. That single fact sharply defined the weakness of his means. He was not pursuing with fresh and powerful forces prepared for a decisive encounter. He was pursuing with fragments, survivors, and such units as still retained some offensive potential. But the Japanese, intent on rapid advance southward, paid too little attention to what followed behind them. That was the opening Yang Sen needed.   On the morning of September 21, the 60th Division acted on information supplied by an old beggar. Such details often sound almost literary, but they remind us that war in China was never fought by armies alone. Villagers, refugees, peddlers, guides, boatmen, and the destitute all participated in the circulation of military knowledge. A beggar could see what a reconnaissance officer had missed. On the basis of that tip, the 60th Division launched a surprise attack on the supply depot of the Japanese 40th Division at Zhangjiayuan. Division Commander Dong Yu led the action.   The Chinese quickly overwhelmed the more than three hundred Japanese troops guarding the depot. Once they broke in, they discovered an astonishing quantity of matériel: shell boxes, ammunition, food, medicine, gasoline, explosives, protective clothing, telephone wire, body bags, stretchers, and more, all stacked beneath heavy canvas. For men accustomed to scarcity, it must have seemed almost unreal. Dong Yu, delighted, is remembered as exclaiming to his deputy commander, "It's practically a department store!" The line has a momentary comic brightness in the middle of war, and that is part of why it survives. But its deeper significance lies in what it reveals. A modern army advancing deep into hostile territory is sustained by accumulation—ammunition, fuel, wire, medicines, rations, transport materials. To seize such a depot is not merely to take objects. It is to grasp the hidden skeleton of movement. Dong Yu then issued a one-word order: "Move."   At once the whole division became a swarm of carriers. Officers and soldiers grabbed whatever they could and began hauling the captured supplies away. The scene must have been one of extraordinary improvised energy—riflemen transformed into laborers, war reduced for a moment to the brute physical act of lifting, dragging, and carrying. They moved like ants dismantling a storehouse. But there was too much to remove and too little time. Before even two regiments had completed the work, the Japanese returned in force. Enraged, they sent more than a dozen aircraft to bomb the troops carrying off the captured crates, while over a thousand infantrymen rushed in on the ground. Dong Yu immediately ordered the men to abandon what remained and destroy it. Amid deafening explosions, the 60th Division withdrew from Zhangjiayuan. The Japanese pursued hard, driving them back into the mountains before finally stopping. Measured purely in terms of territorial occupation, the action changed little. The Chinese did not hold the depot. They were forced back again. But judged in operational terms, the raid mattered. Supplies had been captured, destroyed, or disrupted. Japanese rear security had been embarrassed. Time and energy had been consumed in response. In a campaign where the Japanese were racing south and depending increasingly on stretched lines, such harassment was not trivial.   After September 23, Yang Sen expanded these efforts. He sent whole divisions to harass the Japanese rear while also dispatching battalions and companies to ambush supply columns and disrupt transport lines. This was not the kind of warfare that produces neat dramatic maps in conventional military histories. The actions were scattered, local, opportunistic, and often inconclusive. Yet precisely for that reason they can be misunderstood. Not every useful military action ends in the destruction of an enemy division. Sometimes its value lies in forcing a stronger opponent to spend attention where he had hoped to spend only momentum. These operations were costly and uncertain. Small Chinese units striking roads and depots risked encirclement or aerial punishment. Yet they possessed one advantage: they did not need to win a grand battle to matter. They needed only to make movement harder, supply more precarious, and the rear less secure.   On September 25, even after the 26th and 37th Armies had suffered defeat elsewhere, Yang Sen gathered the troops that still retained some offensive capacity and launched another attack. In these actions, the 90th Division captured Wukou; the 59th Division reached the north bank of the Miluo River; the 60th Division advanced to Donggang; and elements of the 58th Army controlled the Yuanba–Zheyangqiao highway line by the twenty-sixth. These gains were not the dramatic centerpiece of the campaign. But they formed part of the cumulative pressure on Japanese operations. Every road contested from the rear, every convoy threatened, every depot exposed, and every forced diversion of troops weakened the enemy's ability to convert tactical advance into stable success.   The battlefield was fluid enough that Yang Sen's headquarters itself had to keep moving—from the Miluo River northward to Pingjiang. Mobile headquarters in such conditions lived under constant uncertainty. Reports arrived late or contradictory. Rumors outran facts. The front could bend in unpredictable ways. A command post that seemed safely behind the line in the morning might by afternoon lie only a few kilometers from enemy forces. Years later Mao Jiuyin, who had then served as an operations staff officer under Yang Sen, recalled the old commander's outward behavior in those dangerous days. Yang Sen, Mao remembered, was always joking with the people around him and could still laugh and talk during battle. On one occasion he even joked with his bodyguard about putting chili oil in his tea. To younger staff officers, such behavior appeared almost absurd.   Yet they knew how dangerous their situation often was. Sometimes they were only a few kilometers from the main Japanese forces. There is more than anecdote in this memory. Old commanders often cultivated a style of ease under danger not because they felt no fear, but because they believed visible calm itself was part of command. Men take emotional bearings from those above them. A commander who panics spreads panic faster than any enemy breakthrough. Yang Sen was sixty years old during the Second Battle of Changsha, and he liked to remark that he was five years older than Chiang Kai-shek. Age had not removed him from the front. His function in the campaign was not to shatter the enemy in one decisive frontal blow. It was to persist, reappear, sting, and remain troublesome. The 27th Army Group followed the Japanese nearly all the way to the outskirts of Changsha.   They did not fight many large set-piece engagements. That was never their main value. But the Japanese could not ignore them. If Japanese units turned and tried to hit them directly, they tended to dissolve into the landscape. If the Japanese pushed on and ignored them, they reappeared to sabotage roads, hit supply lines, and create alarms in the rear. Even Japanese official histories later described them memorably. They called them "like a swarm of annoying flies." The phrase was meant as contempt. But as so often happens in war, an insult became an accurate description of effect. If these Chinese troops could not be tigers in formal battle, they could still become intolerable as flies. And under certain conditions—fatigue, heat, uncertainty, stretched supply, shaken morale—flies can become more oppressive than an enemy would like to admit.   When later generations look back on campaigns, they often search for a single explanatory image. But the fighting of September 1941 resists reduction to one symbol alone. What gives the campaign its force in memory is not one isolated episode, but the convergence of several pressures at once: a city under threat, a command trying to coordinate multiple fronts, exhausted reinforcements thrown directly into battle, Japanese forces advancing quickly but becoming increasingly vulnerable the farther they pushed, and Chinese troops in the rear refusing to disappear after defeat. Seen from Chongqing, the campaign was a matter of telegrams, maps, and the management of strategic risk. Seen from the front, it was a matter of thirst, mud, broken fieldworks, sudden bombing, exhausted marching, and the uncertainty of whether the next order meant reinforcement, retreat, or death. Seen from the Japanese side, it was initially an aggressive advance toward an important objective, but one increasingly troubled by stretched supply, difficult terrain, and the persistent reappearance of Chinese forces behind the line of movement.   At the same time, the campaign reveals a Chinese war effort that had become more resilient than in the earliest years of the conflict. The Japanese advance toward Changsha was dangerous and at moments appeared close to success. Chinese blocking forces suffered severe defeats. Units arrived exhausted and were hurled into action at once. Commanders lost men at devastating rates. Changsha itself briefly fell into enemy hands. And yet the city was not simply surrendered as an accomplished fact. Chinese forces regrouped. Orders were coordinated across war zones. Reinforcements marched at desperate speed. Counterattacks were mounted. Forces west of the Xiang prepared and crossed back into the city. Elsewhere, troops under Yang Sen gnawed at the Japanese rear and made advance more costly than a map of front lines alone might suggest. This combination of desperate frontal resistance and incessant rear harassment was one of the characteristic strengths of China's resistance in this stage of the war. China could not always match Japanese power in one concentrated blow. But it could absorb, delay, fragment, and trouble that power across space and time. That is why the struggle around Changsha in late September 1941 deserves to be remembered not merely as a sequence of engagements, but as a layered event in which tactical battle, morale, logistics, political endurance, and international context all converged.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. In late September 1941, Japan pushed deeper into China, but Chinese forces—supported gradually by international help—kept resisting. Changsha in Hunan became the central point of the conflict, seen as vital to strategic control in south-central China. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Hunan and Hubei, Yang Sen's 27th Army Group—often using smaller, opportunistic actions—reappeared behind Japanese lines to disrupt depots and convoys. Even when Chinese gains were temporary, the cumulative pressure delayed Japanese momentum.       

The International Brigades and the Fight for Spain**In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by Tony Fox, organiser of the Northeast Volunteers for Liberty and the International Brigades Memorial Organisation, to discuss the newly published collection, *Remember Me to My Comrades: Letters from Spain to Britain*.**The book emerged from a remarkable collaboration with the families of volunteers from the North East of England – one of the industrial heartlands hit hardest by the Great Depression. Through letters, diaries, and previously unpublished documents from the Russian archives, it brings to life the voices of men who went to Spain to fight fascism.Tony explains how the International Brigades were formed in response to the Non-Intervention Treaty signed by Britain, France and other powers. While Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy poured troops and weapons into Franco's Nationalist forces, the Soviet Union organised volunteers through the Comintern. In Britain, the Communist Party – not the Labour Party, which supported non-intervention – recruited and vetted two-and-a-half thousand men.We discuss the diverse motivations of the volunteers: from committed communists who had already fought Oswald Mosley's fascists on the streets of Britain, to idealists who saw Spain as the front line of a wider war against fascism. We explore the unique political character of the International Brigades – an army of working-class activists who knew why they were fighting, and whose morale was sustained through political education, including an essay competition held in the middle of the war.Tony also shares the story of Sam Wild, the last and finest commander of the British Battalion, and the chaotic, heroic rear‑guard actions that defined the British experience – from the defence of Madrid to the bloody retreats across the Ebro.**Topics covered:**- The Non-Intervention Treaty and its consequences- The formation of the International Brigades- The role of the Communist Party in recruitment- The social and political character of the volunteers- The Battle of Jarama and the defence of Madrid- Sam Wild and the British Battalion- Letters from the Russian archives- The human cost of the Spanish Civil War---*Tony Fox's *Remember Me to My Comrades* is available from Barnfather Publishing and independent bookshops. Please consider buying from an independent retailer or directly from the publisher.**If you enjoy the podcast, please consider supporting us – we are migrating from Patreon to Substack. Details in the show notes.*Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.▸ Support the Show & Get Exclusive ContentBecome a Patron: patreon.com/explaininghistory▸ Join the Community & Continue the ConversationFacebook Group: facebook.com/groups/ExplainingHistoryPodcastSubstack: theexplaininghistorypodcast.substack.com▸ Read Articles & Go DeeperWebsite: explaininghistory.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last time we spoke about the Miluo River Catastrophe. On September 17, General Xue Yue, watching alarming reconnaissance telegrams, learns the Japanese 11th Army has massed across the north bank of the Xinqiang River—3rd, 4th, 6th, and 40th Divisions—alongside additional detachments. Chinese operatives even intercept a Japanese order directing divisions to prepare for an attack on September 18. Despite this, Xue Yue's decisions and readiness remain inadequate. By September 21–23, the fighting at and around the Miluo River and Dongting Lake destroys the 37th Army's ability to function as a coherent combat force. The disaster as both tactical collapse and a failure of planning: Japanese interception and decoding of radio orders allow them to shift toward encirclement, turning Chinese movements into a "trap" laid in advance.   #211 The Japanese Blunt China's Iron Army at Changsha Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. The four divisions that had stormed into northern Hunan had made good progress, achieving the victory of defeating three main Chinese armies in quick succession. General Anami Korechika, commanding the Japanese forces, was secretly pleased, but he dared not slacken his efforts in the slightest. He was a methodical man, and he understood that the contest was not yet decided. Every day, his intelligence officers placed before him a stream of intercepted Chinese military telegrams and aerial reconnaissance reports. What they showed gave him reason for both confidence and caution. Two significant forces were moving toward the battlefield — forces unlike those he had so far encountered. One of them was Chiang Kai-shek's elite 74th Army, a formation whose reputation had reached Anami long before, from his time at headquarters in Tokyo. The other was the 10th Army, considered second only to the 74th in quality and fighting spirit.   The 74th Army was no ordinary unit. It had been rigorously trained under German and Soviet instructors specially hired by Chiang Kai-shek, its officers schooled in both European combined-arms doctrine and Soviet tactical flexibility. It was characterized by its disciplined offensive and defensive tactics and was lavishly equipped by the standards of the Chinese military. Most remarkably, it had maintained an undefeated record on the battlefield since the beginning of the war — a distinction that had earned it the title of "Iron Army of the Anti-Japanese War" among the Chinese people. In the high command of the Imperial Japanese Army, it was referred to, with a mixture of respect and wariness, as the Tora no Ko — the "Tiger Child" — meaning, in essence, the ace in the enemy's hand.   The 10th Army was held in nearly equal esteem. The deployment of either of these two formations required the personal approval of Chiang Kai-shek himself. The Generalissimo's principle for employing them was clear and deliberate: they were to be committed only to the most critical battles, those that would decide outcomes, or to the most prominent ones, where their prowess could demonstrate the might of the Chinese army to a watching nation. Since the outbreak of the war, the 74th Army had been kept in reserve at Fenyi in Jiangxi Province, and the 10th Army at Hengyang in southern Hunan. Both forces had been conserving their strength, training, and waiting.   Now Anami's relentless offensive had forced Chiang Kai-shek's hand. The battle situation had tilted dangerously under the weight of Japanese pressure, and the fall of several elite units had left the Chinese commander of the Ninth War Zone, General Xue Yue, with little room to maneuver. Xue Yue had no choice but to appeal to Chongqing for help, and Chiang Kai-shek, reluctantly and with full awareness of the risks, agreed to release his two trump cards. Anami, having mastered his opponent's intentions through his intelligence apparatus, now found himself in the rare and advantageous position of a card player who could see his opponent's hole cards. He carefully planned his battle strategy, studying maps late into the night, conferring with his officers, and calculating how best to neutralize the Chinese elite before they could bring their full weight to bear. He knew that his life's honor, his career, and his legacy rested on this one gamble.   Li Yutang, the commander of the 10th Army, was from Guangrao in Shandong Province — a place that had given China more than its share of fighting men. He was a graduate of the first class of the illustrious Whampoa Military Academy, where he had trained alongside men who would go on to shape the fate of China. At the academy, he had been part of a celebrated group known informally as the "Four Lis of Shandong": himself, Li Xianzhou, Li Yannian, and Li Hanfan. The first three would all rise to significant commands in the Nationalist army. The fourth, Li Hanfan, a native of Changqing in Shandong, had taken an entirely different path, joining the Communist Party of China and fighting the same war under a different flag. In later years, the group became known as the "Three Lis of Shandong," the fourth having parted ways with his classmates long before the guns fell silent.   Li Yutang had not risen quickly or through privilege. He embodied the hardworking, resilient, and tenacious qualities long associated with the men of Shandong — qualities forged by a hard land and harder circumstances. He had climbed the ranks of the army step by step: platoon leader, company commander, battalion commander, regimental commander. Each step had been earned through performance under fire. When Japan launched its full-scale invasion in 1937, Li Yutang was serving as commander of the 3rd Division of the 2nd Army under Li Yannian, participating in the brutal Battle of Shanghai in August of that year. He fought in the grinding urban warfare along the Suzhou Creek, learning lessons in modern combat that would serve him for the rest of the war. The following spring, in March and April of 1938, he led his troops in the Battle of Xuzhou, holding the Linyi line northeast of Taierzhuang, blocking the Japanese 5th Division under Itagaki Seishiro from breaking through to reinforce the embattled Japanese forces at that critical engagement. His handling of the defense contributed to one of the few early Chinese battlefield successes of the war.   For his performance at Xuzhou, he was promoted to commander of the 8th Army. During the Battle of Wuhan in 1938, he led his troops in major engagements against the Japanese 101st and 106th Divisions along the Nanxun Railway, inflicting significant casualties on the attackers. After that campaign, General Xue Yue, recognizing both Li's talent and his Shandong origins — Shandong being home to Mount Tai, the foremost of China's Five Sacred Mountains — personally inscribed a banner reading "Mount Tai Army" and formally presented it to Li Yutang's 8th Army. Chiang Kai-shek added his own recognition, awarding Li Huazhou a medal. In the Battle of Nanchang, Li Yutang again distinguished himself, leading his troops in the defense of Wuning for ten days and ten nights of uninterrupted fighting. When the battle was over, Japanese soldiers lay piled in front of his defensive lines, and the name "Taishan Army" was on every officer's lips from Chongqing to the front. After the First Battle of Changsha in 1939, Chiang Kai-shek personally nominated Li Yutang to take command of the 10th Army — the posting that would now define his legacy. The orders came on September 20, 1941 — three days after the Japanese forces had broken through the Xiangbei defense line in the north. General Xue Yue's summons reached Li Yutang's headquarters in Hengyang, and the 10th Army began immediate preparations for movement to the battlefield.   The mobilization was extraordinary even by the standards of an army that prided itself on discipline and fighting spirit. Li Yutang addressed his men, and the response was unlike anything a commander might ordinarily expect. He received wave after wave of letters — requests to be placed at the front, declarations of determination, pledges to die before surrendering. Some of the letters were written in ordinary ink. Others had been written in blood, the soldier biting his own finger to draw enough for a few lines. These were not men who needed to be driven to battle. They were men who had spent months training for precisely this moment.   Their preparation had been rigorous to the point of fanaticism. For six months before the order came, the 10th Army had conducted intensive training in the three core skills of infantry combat: marksmanship, grenade throwing, and bayonet fighting. The Ministry of National Defense had set a standard that considered a unit successful if one quarter of its men scored "top-tier" in each category. Chiang Kai-shek had personally raised the bar for the 10th Army: eighty percent of every unit must score "top-tier," with the remainder no lower than "excellent." Any unit falling short would face elimination. When the assessments were completed, the result was unambiguous — one hundred percent of the army had met the standard.   Over 30,000 men boarded seven special trains at Hengyang, their military songs and mobilization slogans ringing through the station as families and bystanders watched them depart. The troops traveled by train to Zhuzhou, then transferred to motor vehicles for the road north to Changsha, arriving in the Jinjing area — some seventy kilometers northeast of the city — on September 22nd. They had moved with professional speed. What awaited them would test something no training exercise could fully replicate. From the moment of arrival, the situation was clear to any officer with eyes: the 10th Army had stepped into chaos. However, given the already established passive situation, the 10th Army was like a leaf caught in a whirlpool as soon as it arrived on the battlefield. General Xue Yue, at the Ninth War Zone Command, immediately ordered the entire army to support the besieged 37th Army and simultaneously launch an offensive against the Japanese 3rd Division. It was an ambitious order for troops who had just completed a multi-day journey and had not yet oriented themselves to the ground. Nevertheless, Li Yutang passed the order down and his divisions began to move.   The first division to feel the dislocating effect of high command's demands was Zhu Yue's 190th Division. On September 23rd, the vanguard regiment of the 190th made contact with Japanese forces and was preparing to engage. Before a single shot was fired in earnest, Division Commander Zhu Yue received a telegram from army headquarters ordering him to abandon his current position and rush immediately to Shending Mountain to relieve the siege of the 140th Division of the 37th Army. The order brooked no delay. The troops dropped their baggage where it lay and ran — truly ran, in light order — to the vicinity of Shending Mountain.   They had barely formed ranks at their new position when a second telegram arrived from General Xue Yue. The 190th Division was to immediately reverse course and return to the Fulipu area to establish a defensive line and block the Japanese advance southward. Another forced march, exhausting men who had already marched and traveled for days. They arrived at the designated position on time — a testimony to their conditioning — and Zhu Yue established his division headquarters at Liangjiaduan, near Fulipu. After all the aimless marching and countermanding orders, after all the wasted energy and fruitless attempts, the troops were running on the last of their reserves. They worked through the night constructing fortifications with shovels and bare hands. Just as the first light of dawn revealed the outline of their new positions, the Japanese army advanced.   General Toyoshima Fusataro's Japanese 3rd Division had not rested. It had decisively defeated the 37th Army on the night of the 23rd and turned immediately, without pause, to attack the 190th Division. The blow came from the sky before it came from the ground. At dawn, more than ten Japanese planes swept down over Zhu Yue's division headquarters — seemingly guided, as the Chinese soldiers would later say, as if they had eyes in their heads, so accurate was the targeting. The small village that housed the headquarters was bombed almost to the ground. Dust and smoke billowed over the ruins as the aircraft banked away, and before it had settled, over a thousand Japanese infantrymen, seemingly springing from the earth itself, rushed forward directly toward the headquarters position. The regiment commanders, still at their positions elsewhere, could not be recalled in time.   Division Commander Zhu Yue did not hesitate. He drew his pistol and began commanding his subordinate units to fight back, rallying the headquarters staff and support troops into a perimeter defense. Under the fierce and accurate Japanese fire, Zhu Yue was hit by a bullet in his right arm. Then another round struck him in the left leg, and he went down. Almost simultaneously, Deputy Division Commander Lai Shixiang took command of the nearest available men and attempted to lead a breakout with a machine gun. An enemy mortar round found its mark, and Lai Shixiang was killed instantly. The division headquarters personnel, already shocked by the swiftness of the attack and the wounding of their commander, broke into disorder. Chaos erupted on the battlefield. Many soldiers ran blindly in the smoke and confusion, dying in the crossfire from multiple directions.   Division Chief of Staff Tao Xiu, now acting as deputy division commander with Zhu Yue incapacitated, took hold of the situation as best he could. He led the remnants of the headquarters staff in retreat toward a hollow in a grove of trees near the edge of the village. When the headcount was taken, approximately twenty men remained capable of fighting. It was already ten o'clock in the morning. Tao Xiu gathered these few men and led them along a small path through the dense forest on the outskirts of the village, bypassing Liangjiaduan, searching for the dispersed units of the division.   Out on the main positions, the 568th, 569th, and 570th Regiments were simultaneously surrounded and attacked. The officers and soldiers, exhausted from days and nights of continuous fighting, summoned what remained of their endurance and put up a tenacious resistance. From dawn until the afternoon, several positions were cut off and divided by Japanese encircling movements. In the ever-shrinking pockets, each cluster of defenders became an isolated target for enemy aircraft and artillery. Completely losing the initiative, groups of officers and soldiers perished in the shelling. Many of them died not in defiance but in something closer to despair — regretting this humiliating reversal, the waste of their patriotic aspirations, their unfulfilled desire to fight and kill the enemy on their own terms.   By evening, the regimental commanders had lost control of their respective battalions and companies. The remaining soldiers on each position scattered and concealed themselves in whatever ground offered cover, hiding in all directions across the darkening hills. It was not until midnight that the lightly wounded and unwounded officers and soldiers managed to assemble, as the contingency plan had directed, in a dense forest on the southwest side of the position. Division Commander Zhu Yue, wounded in both his arm and his leg, had been sent to the rear to receive treatment. Acting Deputy Division Commander Tao Xiu stood before the assembled survivors — more than two hundred men gathered from the regiments — and offered them quiet words of comfort. There was little else he could give them. The people present carried the seriously wounded on improvised stretchers and supported the lightly wounded with their arms and shoulders, groping their way through the darkness toward Zhuzhou. The 10th Reserve Division, under Commander Fang Xianjue, had been assigned to hold the Jinjing line — a position that, on paper, formed an anchor of the defensive scheme. In practice, the situation was deeply flawed from the outset. The Ninth War Zone Command had placed the 10th Reserve Division alone at Jinjing with no depth behind it and no friendly forces on either flank — an isolated salient that offered the Japanese every opportunity for encirclement.   On the 23rd, the division captured the Kanai line at noon, an initial success that promised more than it delivered. Around six o'clock in the evening, as darkness gathered, General Kanda Masatsuka arrived at the front with the vanguard of the Japanese 6th Division. He was not a man to move without information. Before committing to a full assault, Kanda ordered a probing attack and watched its progress carefully through binoculars from a small hill behind the advancing force. What he saw gave him pause. However he searched for a weak point in the Chinese line, the defenders showed none. No gap in the wire, no position carelessly manned, no sector that sagged under pressure. Kanda lowered his binoculars and considered his next step. He felt this was indeed an elite unit with excellent tactical skills, and should not be underestimated. He ordered a halt to the attack and waited for the full arrival of his division's strength.   On the morning of the 24th, the Japanese launched their proper assault — a fierce attack from the east, north, and west simultaneously. The three-directional pressure was designed to pin the defenders and deny any lateral reinforcement. Kanda went further, requesting permission from General Anami to concentrate all thirty-plus bombers available for the entire battlefield and direct them at the 10th Reserve Division's positions in a single concentrated raid. Anami granted the request. The bombing was devastating. The defending positions were almost completely destroyed from the air. Yet in the ruins of their fortifications and bunkers, the soldiers of the 10th Reserve Division continued fighting, repelling Japanese ground attacks wave after wave through the rubble and the smoke.   At two o'clock in the afternoon, a report reached Fang Xianjue that halted him in his tracks. A Japanese regiment had executed a large-scale outflanking maneuver around the south side of Jinjing and was approaching the rear of the position. The encirclement was closing. Fang Xianjue was shocked. He now grasped in full the tactical impossibility of his assignment. The Ninth War Zone Command had placed the 10th Reserve Division here alone, exposed on all sides, without depth and without support. The order to "block the enemy's southward advance" had been an empty promise from the start. Fang Xianjue could not understand the strategic intention behind the deployment at all — there was none that made any tactical sense. The only purpose of holding out here, he concluded bitterly, was to theoretically be seen to be "fighting the Japanese." Before Fang Xianjue could translate his analysis into a decision, the Japanese troops launched another fierce attack from the front and both flanks, and one side of the defensive line was breached. The situation became critical. Fang Xianjue decided to withdraw before the encircling force to the south could complete its movement and seal off all escape. He did not have time to seek authorization from the war zone — there was no time. He ordered each regiment to organize its own breakout and reassemble at designated locations.   At four o'clock in the afternoon, Fang Xianjue led the division headquarters in the first withdrawal from the battlefield. Looking back as he departed, he watched as the regiments were cut apart by Japanese fire, large numbers of officers and soldiers falling among the mountain ridges and into the ditches and gullies. There was nothing more he could do for them.   By the 25th, approximately half of the division's troops had reached the designated reception point. After a hasty reorganization, they were ordered to occupy positions along the Xueshi Bridge line and prepare to resume the defense. That same evening, a portion of the Japanese 3rd Division — fresh from its defeat of the 190th Division — launched a fierce attack on Xueshi Bridge. The positions could not be held. The scene of the previous day's rout was repeated almost exactly, and this second defeat completed the destruction of the 10th Reserve Division as a coherent fighting force. General Xue Yue's rebuke reached Fang Xianjue shortly afterward, and the division commander had no way to express the depth of his frustration — the tactical position he had been placed in had made his assignment impossible before the first shot was fired. On the 26th, he led the surviving troops to be received and reorganized by war zone units near Changsha. Compared to the bitter fates of the 190th Division and the 10th Reserve Division, Zhou Qingxiang's 3rd Division wrote a different kind of story in these same days — one of extraordinary tactical competence maintained against mounting odds. In the equally fierce battles, the 3rd Division demonstrated the qualities of an elite force more effectively than any other unit on either side.   On the 22nd, the 3rd Division had been ordered to establish positions two kilometers east of Fulipu. At noon on the 24th, after the Japanese 3rd Division defeated Zhu Yue's 190th Division, a portion of the Japanese force turned and attacked the right flank of Zhou Qingxiang's position. It was repelled. That evening, the Japanese 4th Division, riding the momentum of its success against the 37th Army, launched a night attack on the 3rd Division's left flank. It too was repelled. On the 25th, Zhou Qingxiang's division was attacked from both sides simultaneously by the main forces of two Japanese divisions — forces that outnumbered the defenders several times over. The officers and soldiers of the entire division showed no fear. They fought bravely and with skill honed by months of intensive preparation, holding their lines despite heavy casualties and preventing the Japanese from breaking through at any point.   When word of this resistance was relayed to General Anami Korechika at his headquarters, he fell into a long, uncharacteristic silence. He studied the reports before him, the maps, the casualty tallies on both sides. Then he turned to his chief of staff, General Isamu Kinoshita. "This is the elite force," Anami said quietly. He paused a moment, and added: "I really want to go there and see for myself." The compliment, delivered in the private setting of a Japanese headquarters, was perhaps the most honest assessment of the fighting quality of Zhou Qingxiang's men that history has preserved.   Anami's response, however, was not admiration — it was determination to overwhelm. On the morning of the 26th, he concentrated nearly the entire combat power available to him against the single 3rd Division: units drawn from the Japanese 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 40th Divisions — close to 100,000 men — were directed to surround and destroy the Chinese formation. The 3rd Division stubbornly held its ground despite catastrophic casualties, the soldiers refusing to give way even as the perimeter contracted and the dead accumulated.   To ease the relentless pressure from enemy aircraft, the division commanders made a calculated decision: all positions were ordered to allow the Japanese troops to close to hand-to-hand fighting range. If the enemy was within arm's reach, the bombers above could not strike without killing their own men. Several instances of fierce hand-to-hand fighting erupted across the defensive line as a result — bayonets, shovels, pistols and bare hands in the broken earth and shell craters. By noon, the 8th Regiment had been divided and surrounded. Shortly afterward, the 7th and 9th Regiments met the same fate. Zhou Qingxiang moved the division headquarters to the position of the 7th Regiment to maintain command over his most accessible unit, while the deputy division commander and chief of staff were dispatched to coordinate the independent defense of the 8th and 9th Regiments respectively. For another half day, each of the three regimental pockets fought alone. At dusk, Zhou Qingxiang ordered a breakout.   As darkness fell, exploiting the brief respite that came when the Japanese halted their attacks for the night, each regiment burst simultaneously from its position. Carefully prepared covering detachments remained behind and created convincing feints toward false breakout directions, drawing the enemy's main pursuit forces away from the actual withdrawal routes. The deceptions worked. By the time the Japanese commanders understood what had happened, the breakout had succeeded. Officers and soldiers filtered into the designated reception point in small groups — three men here, five there — arriving through the night and into the following morning. When the count was complete, the 3rd Division was a remnant of less than one-fifth of its pre-battle strength. The finest infantry division in the 10th Army had bled itself almost dry, but it had done so on its own terms, and it had extracted as much as it was possible to extract from an impossible situation.   On September 27th, a chilly autumn wind blew across the city of Changsha. At the playground of Lizhong Middle School in the eastern part of the city, Li Yutang stood and watched the survivors of his divisions come in. A week before, on September 20th, more than 30,000 men had departed Hengyang aboard seven special trains. Their military songs had filled the railway station. Their letters of determination, some written in blood, had been stacked on Li Yutang's desk. Their training scores were the highest ever recorded for a Chinese army unit — a perfect one hundred percent of "top-tier" achievement across all three infantry skills. They had been, by every measurable standard, the finest army China could produce.   Standing now at the playground of a secondary school repurposed as a muster point, Li Yutang looked at what remained: a little over 2,000 men, including lightly wounded soldiers from Changsha who had been caught up in the fighting and bandaged civilians who had taken up arms. Two thousand, from thirty thousand. What had happened to the others? They were dead. They were injured. They were maimed. Some had broken under the pressure and run. The accounting was simple and devastating. Li Yutang's expression remained dignified as he inspected his survivors — the face of a commander who understood that bearing is required of officers precisely in the moments when bearing costs the most. But his heart was filled with tears. Perhaps soon, he reflected, there would be another 10th Army — still heroic and spirited, still singing loudly as it went to war. But it would not be the same one.   History has no gaps or blank pages. The story of the 10th Army's ordeal was barely complete before the next chapter began. Reluctantly, one must turn the page. Following the 10th Army, Wang Yaowu's 74th Army also suffered a crushing defeat. Wang Yaowu had received his orders from Commander Xue on September 21st and had immediately begun moving his three divisions from their cantonments at Fenyi and Xinyu in Jiangxi Province. The 74th Army was composed of three divisions: the 51st Division under Li Tianxia, the 57th Division under Yu Chengwan, and the 58th Division under Liao Lingqi. These were the formations that had kept the "Iron Army" undefeated through four years of brutal warfare. Their code names told their own story — the 51st Division was called "Frontline," the 57th was called "Tiger Warrior," and the 58th was called "Exhilarating." Wang Yaowu had personally chosen the code name for the army headquarters: "Brilliant." Chiang Kai-shek himself had once remarked, "Of all the code names, yours is the best." It was a small distinction, but one that Wang Yaowu quietly cherished.   What Wang Yaowu did not know — could not know, for Anami's intelligence network had kept the preparation perfectly concealed — was that Anami Korechika had been monitoring his movements since the order to deploy was first issued. The Japanese commander had already selected the terrain, positioned his units, and laid the trap. He was waiting for the 74th Army's arrival.   On the 25th, Wang Yaowu led the 57th Division into the battlefield first, marching rapidly as Xue Yue had directed to Chunhua Mountain on the north bank of the Laodao River, east of Changsha, to occupy positions and cover the main force's deployment. On the evening of the 25th, the 169th and 170th Regiments of the 57th Division arrived at the south side of Chunhua Mountain and encountered a Japanese search party of over a hundred men. The 169th Regiment swiftly cut off the small force's escape route, coordinating effectively with the 170th. The Japanese detachment suffered heavy casualties, and the survivors fled toward Chunhua Mountain. When part of the 170th Regiment reached the foot of the mountain, they ran into a much larger Japanese force coming down to meet them — and learned in that moment that Chunhua Mountain had already been occupied by the enemy.   Wang Yaowu responded instantly. To seize the initiative before the Japanese could consolidate, he ordered two regiments to assault Chunhua Mountain that same night. Around midnight, the troops advanced in silence through the dark. After a fierce night battle, two Japanese battalions were unable to hold against the assault and withdrew in the early hours of the morning. The 57th Division had its foothold. At dawn on the 26th, a regiment from the 57th Division followed up the night's success, and Yu Chengwan positioned the division along the Chunhua Mountain line. As the morning advanced, the 51st and 58th Divisions arrived to complete the deployment. Following Xue Yue's orders, Wang Yaowu spread his force across the line: the 57th Division at Chishi River, the 58th Division at Chunhua Mountain itself, and the 51st Division at Fengjiang Bridge. They were ready. Or so it appeared.   At dawn on the 27th, Wang Yaowu went on the offensive. The 57th Division launched a surprise attack on the camp of the main force regiment of the Japanese 3rd Division. The Japanese were caught entirely unprepared — the attack came in total darkness, and the camp was thrown into chaos before anyone could organize a coherent response. The Japanese managed to form some kind of defense only as the first light of dawn broke, and through the morning the two armies clashed furiously. By mid-morning, the Japanese had been forced back three kilometers — a genuine and significant victory achieved through aggression and timing.   Then, at eight o'clock, the Japanese 3rd Division launched its counterattack with the support of dozens of aircraft — fighter-bombers diving low over the Chunhua Mountain positions, strafing and bombing. Both armies knew themselves to be elite formations; each had its country's reputation riding on the outcome. They clashed with corresponding ferocity.   Around noon, Wang Yaowu climbed to the rooftop of a farmhouse and studied the Japanese battle line through his field glasses. What he saw was encouraging: a breach had appeared in the enemy's formation to the north of Chunhua Mountain — a gap that, if exploited quickly, could roll up the Japanese flank. He ordered Li Hanqing, the infantry commander of the 51st Division, to take two regiments and execute an outflanking maneuver through that gap, striking the Japanese from the side. An hour later, Li Hanqing's movement succeeded. The Japanese forces were thrown into disarray, breaking rearward in a rout. For one brief hour, it seemed as though the 74th Army might achieve a decisive success. Then the Japanese 4th Division arrived. It swept in from behind Li Hanqing's flanking force, surrounding his two regiments before they could extract themselves. In the desperate fighting of the breakout attempt, Li Hanqing was shot and killed.   In the afternoon, with two of its regiments lost to encirclement and its flanking stroke reversed, the 57th Division found itself holding off two full Japanese divisions alone. The fighting continued — artillery, rifle fire, close assaults — until nightfall dimmed the battlefield. The division had suffered over 3,000 casualties, and more than half of all commanders below battalion level had been killed or wounded. Division Commander Yu Chengwan conferred with Wang Yaowu over the field telephone, and together they decided to withdraw the troops to prepared positions to hold through the night.   Meanwhile, on the same 27th of September, Liao Lingqi's 58th Division at Chunhua Mountain was subjected to a separate and equally devastating assault by the Japanese 6th Division, reinforced by elements of the 3rd Division. The positions at Chunhua Mountain were compact and clustered — ideal targets for concentrated aerial bombardment. The Japanese bombers came in two waves, and after both had passed, the hastily constructed earthen fortifications were almost entirely destroyed. Across what had been the defensive line, limbs and broken bodies could be seen among the wreckage. The entire division had suffered devastating casualties.   Beginning at nine o'clock in the morning, tens of thousands of Japanese troops launched successive offensive waves, methodically dividing the defensive line into sections and breaking through each one in turn. The defenders engaged the Japanese in hand-to-hand combat at position after position, gunfire and the shouts of bayonet fighters filling the smoke-thickened air. At two o'clock in the afternoon, the Chunhua Mountain defense line collapsed. The surviving soldiers attempted to break out in small groups, but many were intercepted and cut down by Japanese forces waiting along the escape routes.   Wang Yaowu was seething. He directed the battle from wherever he could find a usable vantage point, issuing orders in rapid succession — one moment ordering the 51st Division to send reinforcements to Chunhua Mountain, the next directing the army's directly subordinate regiments to absorb the shattered remnants of the 58th Division, then ordering the 57th Division to block Japanese forces from reinforcing the encirclement. He was everywhere at once, doing the work of a staff of twenty, improvising responses to crises that unfolded faster than any plan could accommodate. And as he directed, the same thought played and replayed: wasn't the Ninth War Zone just feeding them to the wolves? They had jumped into the enemy's encirclement without any initiative, while the enemy could attack from whatever direction they chose. He had nowhere to vent his frustration on the battlefield, only able to fend for himself. While directing the battle, he cursed under his breath: "What kind of hell is this?!"   As dusk fell over the chaos, the gunfire gradually subsided. The Japanese as a rule did not launch night attacks — a pattern the Chinese had come to rely upon for the brief respite it offered. Li Tianxia, commander of the 51st Division, concentrated his troops from the flanks toward the center to consolidate a defensible perimeter. The 57th Division, adjacent to the 51st and badly diminished by the day's fighting, did the same. Both divisions settled into their positions, and the exhausted soldiers lay down fully clothed, weapons in hand, and tried to rest. At midnight, the battlefield exploded.   Fierce gunfire roused the soldiers from whatever shallow sleep they had found. Two elite regiments of the Japanese 6th Division had broken through the gap that had opened between the positions of the 51st and 57th Divisions — a gap created by both units pulling inward — and were driving directly toward the headquarters of the 74th Army. In Wang Yaowu's many years of battlefield experience, this was the only instance he ever encountered of a large Japanese force launching a major attack at night.   The knowledge of terrain displayed by the attacking Japanese regiments was so precise, the route to army headquarters so accurately selected, that it raised immediate suspicions of an intelligence compromise — an inside source who had provided the attackers with maps and positions. Whatever the explanation, the effect was devastating. The headquarters' directly subordinate regiment and guard battalion were outnumbered and quickly overwhelmed. They fought where they could, but the Japanese pushed through them.   The guard platoon leader, a man who had served at Wang Yaowu's side through numerous campaigns, gathered several of his best soldiers and formed a close escort. He led Wang Yaowu into the darkness as the Japanese closed around the headquarters compound. More than a hundred Japanese soldiers gave chase — moving through the dark with a sureness of foot that seemed almost preternatural, as if they had developed night vision. The platoon leader recognized that Wang Yaowu could not outrun a hundred men. He shouted to the general and the remaining escort: "Go quickly!" Then he and a single machine gunner turned and stayed behind. Wang Yaowu ran. A few minutes later, the machine gunner was killed. Shortly after that, the platoon leader was shot through the leg and fell to the ground. He was captured.   Wang Yaowu threw himself into the grass beside a drainage ditch and lay still as Japanese soldiers searched the ground around him, their voices close enough to touch. From his hiding place, he heard his platoon leader — the man who had been at his side day and night, who had chosen to stay behind so that his general might live — cursing the Japanese soldiers from the ground where he lay captured and wounded. Then a Japanese officer drew his sword. The cursing stopped. The Japanese soldiers moved on. The gunfire subsided. Wang Yaowu lay in the grass in the dark and did not move until he was certain they were gone. When he crawled out of the bushes, he looked up at the stars, found the direction of Liuyang, and began walking in the darkness with the few guards who had stayed close. He walked until dawn.   Since joining the army, Wang Yaowu had never allowed himself to think about fear of death. He had spent too many years on battlefields, seen too much death and bloodshed, to entertain it as a personal concern. This time, however, he was in tears. Not from sadness, and not from fear. From something harder to name and harder to bear: frustration — the frustration of a capable commander who had been committed to battle by a higher command that neither understood the ground nor provided him the support to fight on it, and who had watched good men die for orders that made no tactical sense.   In the aftermath of the battle, Wang Yaowu's grief was compounded by something beyond the ordinary losses of combat. The 27th alone had cost the 57th Division nearly half its strength, and the 58th Division had been essentially wiped out as a fighting formation. Of his three powerful divisions, only the 51st remained relatively intact. In war, such losses, however painful, are comprehensible. What happened next was not. Liao Lingqi, the commander of the 58th Division — one of the three officers Wang Yaowu had called his "tigers" — did not remain with his shattered troops to regroup and reorganize them. Instead, after the division's collapse, he slipped away from the battlefield with only his personal guards, changed into civilian clothes, and boarded a train bound for his hometown of Qiyang in southern Hunan to visit his family.   By unhappy chance, a senior staff officer from the Ninth War Zone was aboard the same train. He recognized Liao Lingqi and watched, saying nothing, as the division commander traveled south in civilian dress while his men lay dead on Chunhua Mountain. Upon arriving in Hengyang, the officer went directly to report the incident to General Xue Yue. Xue Yue instructed the Military Law Supervision Department to investigate and referred the case to the Military Commission's Military Law Enforcement Directorate on charges of desertion in the face of the enemy. At that point, in that situation, there was nothing Wang Yaowu could say. He had no words left. He had given everything he had to the battle, and this was what greeted him at the end of it.   The elite 74th Army, with its heroic spirit and its unbroken record, had captured the imagination of the Chinese nation and the hearts of countless young men. When soldiers of the 74th Army returned to their hometowns on leave, they wore their elite status openly, and the prestige of the unit was such that families sought them as sons-in-law. Young men who enlisted and were not selected for the 74th Army were known to weep. What a fine unit. But this time, the trap had been perfectly laid, and the intelligence had been mastered. Anami had looked at his opponent's hole cards and played accordingly. He had concentrated overwhelming force, moved with coordination and speed, and exploited the confusion generated by contradictory orders from the Ninth War Zone Command. The Chinese elite had fought with courage and skill that earned the admiration of their enemies. They had simply been outgeneraled at the operational level.   The Second Battle of Changsha, Phase Three, had cost China two of its finest armies. The 10th Army had departed Hengyang over 30,000 strong and returned barely 2,000. The 74th Army had suffered a crushing defeat from which it would require months to rebuild. Wang Yaowu had walked alone through the dark to Liuyang. Li Yutang had stood in the autumn wind at a schoolyard and looked at what remained of the men who had written their determination in blood.   I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Phase Three of the second battle of Changsha showed Anami Korechika using intelligence and planning to blunt China's elite forces as Chiang Kai-shek reluctantly deployed the "Iron Army" 74th and the 10th. Intercepted communications enable encirclement and heavy losses. Li Yutang's merit and experience shape resistance, yet Japanese strategy dominates from the outset through coordinated advances.

Order "Offensive Christianity" here – https://offensivechristianitybook.com/jchasedavis.comCommonplace — AI-powered Reformed & Puritan theological research. Search 200+ primary sources with real citations. https://commonplace.study/Burn the Ships Men's Conference at The Well Church in Boulder, CO — register here: https://boulderwell.org/burntheships—Guest: Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale ("Raw Egg Nationalist")The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity (Amazon) — hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook - https://amzn.to/4w7aJvlSummaryWhat if the crisis of modern masculinity isn't only spiritual — but biological? Chase sits down with Dr. Charles Cornish-Dale — the Oxford- and Cambridge-trained historian known online as Raw Egg Nationalist — to talk through his provocative new book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. They trace Charlie's unlikely path from medieval church historian to one of the most influential voices in the MAHA movement, and dig into his central thesis: that liberalism itself is a low-testosterone system, that endocrine disruptors and processed food are quietly reshaping men, and that Francis Fukuyama's "last man" is now a physiological reality. Along the way they wrestle with the Christian temptation to divorce body from soul, Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as a slave morality, the guilty conscience, Christian vitalism, and whether the church still has the vitality to fight. Whether you're deep in this conversation already or skeptical of the whole thing, this one will sharpen you.Support the showSign up for the Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/chasedavisFollow Full Proof Theology on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/fullprooftheology/Follow Full Proof Theology on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/fullprooftheology/

We've done plenty of abstract shows on American Christian nationalism. But this one is about a single family: the Greens of Oklahoma City, owners of the Hobby Lobby retail empire, and probably the wealthiest Christian nationalist family you've never heard of. According to investigative writer Michael Blanding, the Greens have amassed a $14 billion fortune from selling glitter glue and popsicle sticks. In his new book The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby, Blanding reveals what he insists is this billionaire family's quest to craft a Christian nation. Hobby Lobby is an all-American story — especially in its ridiculous ironies. A fundamentalist fortune built on bead-buying hippy consumers. The business came out of the Sixties counterculture. That said, the Greens have built the closest thing to a Christian corporate behemoth. Hobby Lobby has no corporate debt, is closed on Sundays, pays above average wages, and has a founder, David, who still flies coach. And yet this is the same Trump-loving corporation that forced its warehouse laborers to work during COVID and denies them birth control coverage. And then there is the Museum of the Bible, blocks from the Capitol — God's base camp, as it's known — stocked with 40,000 shady artifacts including a $1.7 million Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, and forged Dead Sea Scrolls. Such are the absurdities of life in Christian MAGAland. Render unto Trump what is Trump's. Then deduct, forge or steal the rest. Five Takeaways •       The Most Influential Family You've Never Heard Of. Hobby Lobby is an $8 billion business with a thousand big-box stores, and the Greens are worth $14 billion — among the richest people in America — from what Blanding calls the perfect recession-proof business: when times are good, people buy crafts, and when times are bad, they make things instead of buying them. David Green saw the waste at the TG&Y department store chain in the sixties, started making picture frames in his garage, and — by his own account — owes the takeoff to the beatniks and hippies buying beads. The family credits God rather than themselves: chosen, anointed, and bearing no responsibility for the wealth. •       True Believers, Not Hypocrites. Whatever else the Greens are, Blanding insists, they are not hypocrites: they genuinely believe everyone is going to hell without Jesus, and they live accordingly. No corporate debt, wages well above the minimum, closed Sundays to honor the Lord, a founder who flies coach and lives modestly in Oklahoma. The record cuts both ways: during COVID, warehouse employees worked unmasked in hundred-degree heat after David Green's wife had a vision from God that the company must stay open. And the 2014 Supreme Court case over birth control coverage made Hobby Lobby a national flashpoint — half the country boycotts it, and the other half shops there precisely because of it. •       Seven Mountains and the Attack on Pluralism. The Greens work within the democratic system, Blanding concedes under Andrew's devil's advocacy — but they are associated with Seven Mountains dominionism, the crusade for evangelical control of government, law, entertainment, and the other commanding heights of American society. Steve Green, David's son, is on record that there is one true worldview, incompatible with all others, and that pluralism should not exist because the rules are laid out in the Bible. His Bible curriculum for public schools taught scripture as reliable historical truth. This isn't guilt by association, Blanding argues — it's what the family says in its own books and interviews. •       Trump as Cyrus. David Green came out against Trump in 2016 — an op-ed, a Fox News appearance, support for Marco Rubio — as a poor example of moral leadership. Then Trump became the nominee, the Supreme Court became the prize, and the family fell in line with the movement's theology of the imperfect vessel: Trump as Cyrus, the pagan Persian king who freed the Jews and delivered for the faithful without being one of them. To their credit, Blanding notes, the bet paid off — no president, including the professed believers, has pushed conservative Christian exceptionalism further through the courts and executive orders. •       God's Base Camp: The Museum of the Bible. Blocks from the Capitol sits the Greens' Museum of the Bible, stocked with some 40,000 cuneiform tablets, papyri, and Torah scrolls acquired in part to prove the Bible historically true — and acquired, it turned out, from shady dealers. The federal government seized the $1.7 million Gilgamesh Dream Tablet as looted from Iraq; the museum's Dead Sea Scrolls proved to be forgeries; and the acquisition machine doubled as a tax strategy, with artifacts bought cheap, reappraised high, and donated for deductions so large they sometimes paid for themselves. Radical Christian conservatives held their conferences there — one called it God's base camp. Ingenious, entirely legal, and, in Blanding's telling, entirely revealing. About the Guest Michael Blanding is a Boston-based investigative journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, WIRED, Slate, Smithsonian, and The Boston Globe Magazine. His previous books include The Map Thief, a New York Times bestseller; The Coke Machine; and In Shakespeare's Shadow, the subject of his last appearance on this show in 2022. His new book is The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family's Quest to Craft a Christian Nation (PublicAffairs, July 14, 2026). References: •       The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: Inside a Billionaire Family's Quest to Craft a Christian Nation by Michael Blanding (PublicAffairs, July 14, 2026). Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times: “Blanding is at the height of his arts and crafts.” •       Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) — the Supreme Court case in which the company successfully argued it need not provide insurance covering birth control, and the moment Hobby Lobby became a national flashpoint. •       The Museum of the Bible — the Greens' institution blocks from the Capitol, whose looted Gilgamesh Dream Tablet was seized by the federal government and whose Dead Sea Scrolls proved to be forged. •       Seven Mountains dominionism — the movement seeking evangelical Christian control of government, law, media, entertainment, and the other commanding heights of society. •       

Last time we spoke about the battle for Dayun Mountain. Chinese forces  under Xue Yue, believed they were encircling an exposed Japanese regiment. Acting on that assumption, Chinese units concentrated attacks to crush the "trapped " force, hoping to annihilate an elite enemy formation. Their pressure briefly seemed to succeed: on the 13th–14th, Chinese assaults compressed the Japanese positions to a small area, and individual fighting around ambush and prepared defenses produced moments where "victory appeared close." But the Chinese command misunderstood the target. The Japanese had layered deception: Dayun Mountain was held to draw attention, then replaced at night with another unit to maintain the appearance of continued occupation. Despite heavy fighting, the Dayun Mountain battle ends in stalemate by Sept. 17, and Chinese attention turns back to the primary offensive around Changsha.   #210 The Miluo River Catastrophe Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. On the morning of September 17, 1941, General Xue Yue, commander of the Ninth War Zone, sat at his desk at the headquarters on Changsha's Yuelu Mountain and fell into deep thought. Spread before him were a series of intelligence telegrams dispatched by the reconnaissance teams of his war zone and by General Yang Sen, commander of the 27th Army Group operating to the north. What they described was unambiguous and alarming. Along the north bank of the Xinqiang River, stretching westward from Yueyang, reconnaissance had identified a massive Japanese build-up: the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 40th Divisions of the Japanese 11th Army, along with five additional detachments, had taken up positions facing the river. On the afternoon of September 16th, General Kanda, commander of the Japanese 6th Division, had personally toured the north bank accompanied by a retinue of staff officers, training his binoculars across the river for a long and deliberate survey of the Chinese defensive positions on the southern bank. Perhaps most conclusively, Chinese operatives working behind enemy lines had tapped Japanese military telephone lines and intercepted a direct communication from the 11th Army to all of its divisions, ordering them to prepare for an attack on September 18th. On any reasonable reading, the evidence pointed in one direction: a massive Japanese offensive was imminent. Yet Xue Yue, one of China's most celebrated wartime commanders and a man renowned for the tenacity with which he had defended Changsha, arrived at a different conclusion. He had been studying the record of 11th Army Commander Korechika Anami and came away convinced that Anami was a general who habitually used a mix of truth and deception in his operations—a man for whom the most obvious sign was precisely the most suspicious one. The scale of the preparations, their openness, the conspicuous presence of senior officers on the riverbank—all of it struck Xue Yue as too theatrical to be real. He concluded that Anami was feigning a frontal attack on the Xinqiang River in order to draw the main force of the war zone forward, leaving the flanks exposed for a surprise breakthrough elsewhere. Once this interpretation took hold in Xue Yue's mind, it became immovable. No subordinate could dislodge it. When intelligence reports then confirmed that the Japanese had transported the equipment for building pontoon bridges to the very banks of the Xinqiang River—a detail that left virtually no room for doubt about what was being planned—Xue Yue remained unmoved. He told his chief of staff with quiet certainty: "No rush. Let's see tomorrow." He was unaware that he had already lost his tomorrow. At dawn on September 18th, after 11th Army Commander Korechika Anami presided over the routine silent prayer ceremony that opened each day of active operations, he drew his gleaming ceremonial sword and pointed it towards northern Hunan. The battle had begun. On the Chinese side of the Xinqiang River, the first indication that this was no ordinary morning came from the sky. Air raids were a familiar occurrence along the front; the veterans of the 4th Army had grown accustomed to Japanese bombing runs. But this time was different. The number of bombs was greater, the density higher, and the bombs themselves heavier than anything the soldiers on the south bank had experienced before. Two successive waves of air attack struck the fortifications with crushing force, destroying positions that had taken months to construct. Then came the infantry. At Xiaotang, Siliufang, Tongxi Bridge, Shanmu Bridge, and a string of other crossing points along the river, dozens of tanks led the assault, pushing forward with unstoppable momentum, their treads churning up the riverbank mud as the infantry followed closely behind, advancing through fire, forcing their way across the water. On the not-so-wide front in Xiangbei, four Japanese divisions had lined up side by side—like four ferocious beasts pouncing forward simultaneously. Even the veteran soldiers of the defending Chinese forces, men who had been fighting the Japanese for years, had rarely seen such a terrifying formation. The troops defending the Xinqiang River were the 4th Army under Ou Zhen, one of the most distinguished units in the Nationalist order of battle. The 4th Army had earned the reputation of "Iron Army" during the Northern Expedition, where it had demonstrated a ferocious capacity for breaching fortified positions and defending strategic points under fire, and it had fought many of the major battles of the War of Resistance. In theory, the army consisted of four divisions: Zhang Deneng's 59th Division, Chen Kan's 90th Division, Bai Huizhang's 102nd Division, and the 60th Division, which had recently been transferred to the army's command. In practice, however, by September 18th the Iron Army had been hollowed out. During the concurrent Battle of Dayun Mountain, the Ninth War Zone and the 27th Army Group had stripped away most of the 59th and 102nd Divisions to commit them elsewhere, while the 60th Division had followed the army group as a reserve force. What remained at the Xinqiang River was the 90th Division and only a remnant of the 102nd—a fragment of what had once been a formidable fighting force. Xue Yue had planned for the first-line position to hold for three days. It held for two hours. Against a Japanese force that outnumbered the defenders several times over and enjoyed an absolute advantage in artillery and air power, the position could not stand. In just two hours, the Japanese broke through the 102nd Division's defensive line and then swung their forces around to encircle the 90th Division. With no remaining options, Xue Yue ordered both units to retreat to the second line of defense. The Xinqiang River had fallen.  The crisis at the Xinqiang River was compounded by the predicament of Yang Sen, commander-in-chief of the 27th Army Group, who should have been the force most capable of responding to the breakthrough. Instead, Yang Sen found himself trapped far to the east, bogged down in a battle on Dayun Mountain from which he could not extract himself. The situation on Dayun Mountain was one of those military embarrassments that seem almost unbelievable in retrospect. Yang Sen had committed five full divisions to encircle what was supposed to be a single regiment—the 234th Regiment of the Japanese 40th Division, which had dug into the deep mountain. What followed was a sustained humiliation. Two divisions were ground down until their combined fighting strength equalled that of one. Another division was reduced to a regimental shadow of itself. Yang Sen, who had first served in the army in 1906 and had seen virtually every variety of military difficulty in three and a half decades of Chinese warfare, said afterwards that he had rarely experienced such deception. The Shigematsu Regiment, ensconced in the mountains and dense forest, had proved maddeningly resilient. Yang Sen had committed his forces expecting a quick resolution—finish the battle on Dayun Mountain, then redeploy to defend the Xinqiang River—but the regiment would not be finished. He could not advance and he could not retreat. Just as he was preparing to intensify the assault for another day or two, certain that the enemy must finally be near collapse, the news arrived on the morning of September 18th that the Japanese had launched their general offensive across northern Hunan. By nine o'clock that morning, the Xinqiang River's first line of defense was already gone. Yang Sen immediately ordered the abandonment of the Dayun Mountain operation and commanded all divisions to redeploy back towards the Xinqiang River. But the Japanese had moved too fast. Between the first and second lines of Chinese defense there were only scattered guard units; the main force was simply not in place. The second-line troops, moreover, had been configured according to the defensive setup used during the First Battle of Changsha and were wholly unsuited to withstand such a massive, concentrated enemy thrust. The defending forces were too weak and too thinly spread to mount any gradual, coordinated resistance. The Japanese advanced through the gap as if they were in an empty field. The five divisions of the 58th Army and the 4th Army now found themselves in a desperate race against the Japanese, studying maps as they marched, trying to reach blocking positions before the enemy could. No matter what they did, they could not outrun the 11th Army. It was not merely the front-line units of the 4th Army that were endangered by the speed of the Japanese advance. Even the army headquarters itself, positioned forward in the proud tradition of the Iron Army, found itself running for its life. Army Commander Ou Zhen had been directing the battle from his headquarters in a small village called Lintang, located on the south bank of the Xinqiang River—a mere twenty kilometers behind the front line. The proximity was deliberate and characteristic of the Iron Army's ethos, a visible declaration that its commander would live or die alongside his men. On this day, it nearly proved fatal. Among those at the headquarters was Li Rupin, a native of Jing County in Anhui Province, who served as a sergeant squad leader in the 2nd Company of the 4th Army's Guard Battalion. Years later, reflecting on the events of that day, Li said without hesitation that of all his eight years fighting in the War of Resistance against Japan, that one battle was the most humiliating he had ever experienced. "The army headquarters was located in a small village called Lintang, south of the Xinqiang River, only about 20 kilometers away from the front lines," Li recalled. "The army headquarters was located in the front, which was a tradition of the 'Iron Army' to show that the commander was not afraid of danger and would live and die with his brothers. In that battle, we did not expect the enemy to break through the position so quickly. Not long after the battle started, the army headquarters had to move. Our guard battalion's task was to follow the army headquarters and serve as guards." Li described how Company Commander Chang Mingli assigned his platoon to help load the army headquarters' equipment onto trucks—huge, heavy boxes that required real effort to shift. While the loading was underway, Li caught sight of Army Commander Ou Zhen himself, speaking intently on the telephone. Li noted that Ou Zhen was ordinarily a man of few words, always seeming lost in thought, serious with the troops but not given to the kind of arbitrary reprimands that characterized lesser officers. What struck Li most vividly about the Army Commander, even in the midst of that morning's chaos, was a detail almost absurd in its incongruity: a pair of leather shoes that were always so perfectly polished they reflected light. "I heard he had studied abroad," Li added simply. Before the loading was even complete, the sound of machine gun fire erupted from the southwest of the village. A sentry reported: enemy attack detected, number unknown. Company Commander Chang, still pulling on his leggings, turned to Li and said without breaking stride: "Quickly take your squad and follow the deputy company commander. You must keep the enemy out of the village." Li took evident pride in the character of the guard battalion, comparing it unfavorably to what he saw in later years. "I see that nowadays, officers choose bodyguards who are fair-skinned and delicate, like little girls. I don't know why," he reflected. "Back then, our guard battalion, including the commander's personal bodyguards, were all big, dark-skinned men. Our squad of 12 men were all broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, and carrying a machine gun was like an ordinary person carrying a rifle." The squad carried three light machine guns, and each soldier also carried a pistol. They drilled constantly on marksmanship and physical conditioning. In the tradition of the unit, a guard soldier was expected to be able to carry his officer for dozens of miles without slowing and without fear of death. Li led his squad to the southwest corner of the village, where the 1st Company of the guard battalion was already engaged with the Japanese in a cemetery just outside the village boundary. The 1st Company commander had just descended from a rooftop when Deputy Company Commander Yan arrived and assessed the situation. "There are about 100 enemy soldiers in this direction," the 1st Company commander reported. "I don't know if there are any more in other directions." Yan replied without hesitation: "I'll take my four squads to outflank them and find out what's going on with the enemy. If it's a good opportunity, we'll wipe them out." He asked and received permission from the deputy battalion commander, who transferred three additional machine guns from the 1st Company to Yan's force. The squad slipped around to the south of the village, entered a nursery grove, and began working their way southwest to flank the enemy. "Before we even emerged from the woods, enemy machine guns opened fire," Li recalled. "The nursery grove was planted too densely, so it was inevitable that we'd bump into tree branches. We crept forward, keeping close to the ground, when the deputy company commander gave the order: 'Prepare grenades.'" Li looked back and saw that all his men had kept pace. Then Deputy Company Commander Yan's voice rang out clearly: "Charge!" He burst out of the woods at the head of the column. "Deputy Company Commander Yan is a graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy," Li said. "People say that Whampoa graduates are always at the forefront of battle. Others may not know, but several of us in our battalion are like that." The charge was furious and caught the enemy entirely off guard. "We shouted 'Charge! Kill!' and followed the deputy company commander out of the grove," Li recounted. "The enemy was about 40 or 50 meters ahead. Hearing the shouts, they hurriedly turned their guns to fire at us, but it was too late! We threw out our grenades, lay down, and fired back at the enemy. At this moment, the 1st Company also charged out of the village. The enemy could not stop them and retreated in droves. Looking around, there were no fewer than 200 of them. The enemy suffered a loss and left behind more than a dozen dead bodies." The 2nd Company did not pursue. Led by Deputy Company Commander Yan, they withdrew back to the village, where the deputy battalion commander stood at the crossroads and praised the 2nd Company for their fighting before immediately ordering them to follow the army headquarters and relocate. Li had barely grabbed his backpack and tied it to his body before gunfire erupted again outside the village. The Japanese had returned. Two battalions of the army reserve moved up to engage them, and the army's trucks and cars poured out of the village and accelerated south along the road. The guard battalion ran after them on foot. In less than half an hour, the enemy caught up. There were cavalrymen and a large truck packed with infantry. Li registered the significance of this with something close to shock: "It seems that the Xinqiang River has really been lost to the enemy, otherwise how could cars still drive across?" The battalion commander—whose surname, Li noted with dry humor, was the same as the Generalissimo's—ordered the 2nd Company under the deputy battalion commander to form a rear guard. They had one artillery platoon and two mortars between them. There was no time to prepare fortifications; the soldiers scattered on both sides of the road and found their own firing positions as best they could. When Li looked back south, the army headquarters was already a distant speck on the road. "The enemy was getting closer and closer," he recalled. "First, fifty or sixty cavalrymen charged over, brandishing swords and guns and shouting. The trucks were behind them, and we could already see two machine guns mounted on the front of the trucks." The deputy battalion commander's voice carried steadily over the noise: "Brothers, stay calm, aim carefully before you fire—we're going to slaughter a pig and drink tonight!" Nobody laughed, Li noted carefully, but nobody broke either. What followed was a running, desperate firefight. Within the range of 600 to 200 meters, the rear guard inflicted severe casualties on the advancing Japanese. Li watched soldiers toppling from their horses. One horse, shot but not immediately killed, dragged its dead rider—still entangled in the stirrups—forward at a gallop until it collapsed only a few steps from Li, the sudden impact startling him badly. The enemy dismounted from the trucks and formed attack waves, pressing the assault in shifts. The Chinese machine guns worked to suppress each wave and prevent the Japanese from closing the distance. The deputy battalion commander directed the two mortars against the densest enemy concentrations. Then one of the mortars exploded inside its own barrel, killing two gunners instantly. "I still can't figure out why," Li said years later. "The fuse of the mortar shell is on that tip, how could it explode inside the barrel?" There was no answer to be found. The two men were simply dead, and there was no time to grieve them. The rear guard repelled two enemy attacks before the deputy battalion commander ordered a withdrawal while the enemy paused to regroup. It was past two o'clock in the afternoon. "It's all just running," Li said with characteristic bluntness. "How can I not get tired? Even if I'm tired, I still have to keep running!" As they ran, Li overheard the company commander say quietly to the deputy battalion commander: "Actually, we can wipe out these enemies." The deputy battalion commander turned on him with a fierce look: "Eat it all up! Have you forgotten what we're here for again?" The exchange brought to Li's mind a memory from two years earlier, when he had first been assigned to the guard battalion. He had been transferred from the machine gun company of the 2nd Battalion, 305th Regiment of the 102nd Division at the end of 1939, appointed as deputy squad leader. Company Commander Chang had spoken to him at that time, asking why he had joined the army. "Who else would come here if not to fight the Japanese?" Li had answered. The company commander replied: "Very good, but the guard battalion's primary task is to ensure good security; that's the most important thing." The assignment had chafed at Li ever since—a natural fighter who had been a front-line machine gun squad leader, now consigned to watching other men fight. On one holiday, having drunk rather more than was wise, he had gone to the company commander and announced that he wanted to return to the 102nd Division and "mow down the Japanese with a machine gun." The company commander, who had also been drinking, chuckled and said: "Have you had enough of life? You might as well stay here and squat obediently! What do you know about life? You don't know anything! After we win, go home, get a wife, and live a good life..." Now, running south along a road contested by Japanese cavalry and infantry, with the army headquarters already out of sight ahead of him, Li perhaps understood the company commander's words in a way he had not before. The pursuit was unrelenting and grew worse before it improved. Over a hundred cavalrymen and four trucks drove after the guard unit without pause. In an attempt to split and divert the enemy, the company dispatched a platoon under Deputy Company Commander Yan himself down a different road, to lure one group of pursuers away. None of the men in that platoon returned alive. The deputy battalion commander led the remaining force in a continuing fighting retreat, engaging another Japanese contingent in a separate encounter that cost more than twenty dead and thirty wounded. Eventually the survivors managed to cross a large river, finally shaking off the pursuers, and caught up with the army headquarters at dusk. They had barely had a moment to catch their breath when night fell and they stumbled into another large Japanese force in the darkness. The 4th Army—the Iron Army, the pride of the Northern Expedition—seemed to have its commander and headquarters specifically targeted by the enemy. Driven from one position to the next throughout the day, they were eventually pushed up into the hills of Mufu Mountain and did not escape danger until the following morning. "That battle," Li Rupin concluded, "was truly humiliating." When the scale of the Japanese offensive became undeniable on the evening of September 18th, Xue Yue finally grasped the gravity of what was unfolding. It was too late to adjust his forces meaningfully; the overall numerical superiority he had enjoyed across the theater of operations had dissolved wherever the Japanese chose to strike, becoming a dangerous numerical disadvantage at each critical point. In just one day, even Yuelu Mountain—the historic height that had dominated Changsha and housed his headquarters—was no longer safe. He moved the war zone command post south to Zhuting and urgently telegraphed the Military Commission in Chongqing, requesting that Chiang Kai-shek immediately transfer troops from other war zones to provide reinforcements, warning that without them the situation would deteriorate with serious consequences for the national war effort. The telegram arrived in Chongqing, where Chiang Kai-shek and several senior military advisors sat in silence before the battle map in the Military Commission Operations Room, with the grim concentration of men watching a difficult game of chess they cannot influence. Troop movements take time. While the number of Japanese troops committed to northern Hunan was not enormous in absolute terms, they moved with unstoppable momentum. Xue Yue was requesting three to four combat corps—a mobilization from outside the Ninth War Zone that could not possibly be accomplished in the available time. Chiang Kai-shek was at a loss for what to do. He paced back and forth in the corridor adjoining the operations room. The only foreigner among the assembled staff—a blond-haired man with a prominent nose—was the Soviet military advisor Chuikov. He walked up to Chiang and fell into step beside him, pacing with him as he spoke. "Hunan and northern Hunan are in a passive position and we don't have any good solutions for the time being," Chuikov said. "Why don't we think about other things? Isn't there an ancient Chinese story called 'Besieging Wei to Rescue Zhao'?" Chuikov's specific proposal was this: if the forces of the Sixth War Zone were to attack the Japanese 13th Division at Yichang—a city in Hubei Province that had fallen to Japan in June 1940, and which was garrisoned by a division under the overall command of Anami's 11th Army—Anami Korechika would not be able to remain indifferent to the threat. Yichang was no ordinary city. It controlled the crucial choke point on the Yangtze River's waterway, and since its capture it had placed much of the river under Japanese control. More critically for the Chinese, Yichang Airport had become the closest bomber base to Chongqing, and the Japanese aircraft that harassed the wartime capital daily flew from that field. The Military Commission had long been reluctant to authorize a major attack on Yichang for these very reasons—it would not be easy to retake, and failure would be costly. But why not seize this moment? Chiang Kai-shek stopped walking, considered Chuikov's proposal, and nodded. He thanked the Soviet general for his suggestion, and the two men returned to the operations room together. Chiang instructed Chief of Staff Xu Yongchang to draft an implementation plan for combined operations: the Ninth War Zone would continue engaging the Japanese in northern Hunan, while the Sixth War Zone would simultaneously launch a counterattack against Yichang and ensure its capture. While Chongqing deliberated over the Yichang gambit, the immediate question facing the Ninth War Zone was how to organize a second line of defense following the fall of the Xinqiang River. The Japanese had also successfully landed forces on both sides of the Xiangjiang River estuary at Shangqingshan, blocking the waterway, which further constrained Chinese options. Xue Yue's solution was straightforward: he proposed deploying the 37th and 26th Armies in a line along the south bank of the Miluo River, using the river as a natural barrier to halt the Japanese advance toward Changsha. His chief of staff, Wu Yizhi, agreed without reservation and immediately instructed the operations section chief, Zhao Zili, to begin drafting the necessary orders. But Zhao Zili had been turning the strategic problem over in his mind, and he had reached a different conclusion. Zhao was a graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy's 6th class, a veteran of the Battles of Nanchang and Shanggao, and a man who had watched this war closely from his position at the center of the war zone's planning operations. At this moment he asked permission to share his thinking with his two superiors. Zhao's argument was systematic and urgent. The combined strength of the two armies—five combat divisions in total—was clearly insufficient to withstand four intact Japanese divisions in a set-piece defensive battle along the Miluo River. The 10th and 74th Armies were being summoned from elsewhere to reinforce the theater, but by Zhao's calculation they would require another four days to arrive. A static defense of the Miluo River line, therefore, would pit inadequate forces against overwhelming pressure for four days, and those forces would be destroyed long before help arrived. His alternative proposal was as follows: rather than standing and fighting at the Miluo, the two armies should conduct a deliberate fighting withdrawal—using alternating rear-guard actions and mutual cover—to fall back all the way to the south bank of the Liuyang River, in the hills immediately north of Changsha. The timing, Zhao argued, was almost providential in its precision: if the 26th and 37th Armies arrived at the Liuyang River at roughly the same moment that the 10th and 74th Armies arrived at the same position from the east, the combined force of four armies could then turn and strike the Japanese formations—which by then would have advanced more than a hundred kilometers into hostile territory with supply lines stretched thin and fighting strength degraded by continuous combat. Even if the Chinese could not completely sever the Japanese supply lines, the enemy would be exhausted, and victory under those conditions would be certain. Zhao Zili finished his presentation in one breath and waited. Xue Yue and Wu Yizhi conferred briefly. Then they decided to proceed with the original plan. Zhao Zili sighed inwardly. He got up, returned to his office, and began drafting the orders that, in his professional judgment, would lead to catastrophe. One hour later, the orders embodying Xue Yue's thinking were converted to radio waves and flew into the night sky. As some poet once asked of fate: "When the curtain rises, you don't know whether it's a comedy or a tragedy." On the morning of September 20th, in the intelligence section of the Japanese 11th Army's Special Operations headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Hachimō rose from his seat feeling dizzy and unsteady on his feet. He had been awake for an extraordinary stretch of hours, hunched over a radio set in a state of almost superhuman concentration. He took a couple of steps before realizing he was still wearing his headset. He pulled it off, tossed it onto the radio equipment, and—holding the handrail for support—made his careful way down from the third floor to the second. Hachimō was not a professional soldier by background. Before the war, he had been a young designer at the renowned Mitsubishi Corporation. After the outbreak of hostilities, he had enlisted, taught himself the Chinese language and writing system, and dedicated himself entirely to the exacting discipline of cryptanalysis. Given the severe technological limitations of the era, what he accomplished rested on a kind of willpower and intuition that bordered on the extraordinary. His method was laborious and painstaking: he spent long hours with a headset pressed against his ear, listening to the endless stream of radio signals, detecting patterns, discerning differences and similarities among thousands of beeps and pulses. He analyzed signal traffic appearing over time and correlated it against observed enemy troop movements. He used captured battlefield documents to decode fragments of text, then leveraged those fragments to deduce the positions of commonly used characters in Chinese military telegrams. Every time the Chinese side changed their cipher, all of Hachimō's accumulated work was rendered worthless in an instant, but he would begin again—listening, thinking, starting over from nothing, with the same unbroken patience. On the perfectly timed morning of September 20th, Lieutenant Colonel Hachimō achieved what he had been working toward. He cracked the cipher in use by the Ninth War Zone for communications with its various subordinate armies, and successfully intercepted and decoded the operational deployment order that the Ninth War Zone Command had issued to all its armies on the night of September 18th—the very orders that Zhao Zili had drafted in quiet despair after his plan was rejected. Those orders told the Japanese exactly where every Chinese unit was going, what it intended to do, and when. Hachimō made his way downstairs and reported his achievement. Staff officer Kinoshita Isamu read the summary, then stood and walked without a word into the room where 11th Army Commander Anami Korechika was at work. The other officers in the room looked at Hachimō with confusion, uncertain what had just happened. After a few minutes, Anami and Kinoshita returned together. Anami stepped forward and took Hachimō's hand. "I, the Commander, congratulate you," Anami said, "on becoming the first officer to receive a certificate of merit in Operation Plus. Now I order you to go and rest immediately." The intelligence transformed the battle. Anami's original operational plan had been relatively modest in its ambition: a breakthrough along the Changsha-Yueyang highway, advancing toward Jinjing and the Xiangjiang River, with the 3rd and 4th Divisions planned for deployment toward the river. But now that the Japanese held a complete map of Chinese intentions—the positions, routes, and assignments of every army in the Ninth War Zone—a far more ambitious opportunity presented itself. What could be more valuable, or more satisfying, than the direct encirclement and annihilation of the main Chinese forces in the field? Anami immediately revised his entire operational deployment. As Chinese historical records later documented: "The Japanese intercepted and deciphered the radio telegrams issuing operational orders from the Ninth War Zone, gaining access to the Nationalist Army's operational plans and deployments. This led to a shift in their original strategic concept from a breakthrough to an encirclement of the Nationalist Army's right flank." The trap was set. The Chinese armies, following Xue Yue's orders faithfully, were marching toward positions the Japanese already knew they would occupy. The 26th Army was commanded by Xiao Zhichu, and it comprised three divisions: the 32nd Division under Wang Xiushen, the 41st Division under Ding Zhipan, and the 44th Division under Chen Yong. When Xiao received Xue Yue's orders to move his army to defend the south bank of the Miluo River, the situation was already deeply unfavorable. The Japanese had broken through the Xinqiang River line and were advancing rapidly southward; the 26th Army was positioned in the Liuyang and Yong'an area to the west, at a starting point that was even farther from the Miluo River than the Japanese forces were. The army was engaged in a race against a faster-moving enemy to reach the same objective, running from the farther starting block. The timing was unfavorable. The location was unfavorable. And the personal dimension was unfavorable as well, in a way that would prove deeply consequential, because Xue Yue and Xiao Zhichu harbored a long-standing resentment toward one another with its roots six years in the past. In 1935, both men had attended the third session of the Lushan Officers Training Corps, each holding the rank of army commander in the army but serving as battalion commanders within the training structure. The corps was nominally commanded by Chiang Kai-shek himself, with Chen Cheng as deputy commander. Xue Yue was a favorite of Chen Cheng—a celebrated battle commander who had fought his way across half of China—and he carried himself accordingly, often holding forth at length in seminars and discussions and not infrequently straying off-topic into territory where his assertions were questionable. The other senior officers present were content to listen, taking what was useful and ignoring the rest. Xiao Zhichu, however, was a man of earnest and literal disposition who simply could not let inaccuracies pass without challenge. He disputed Xue Yue's claims on several occasions, insisting on clarifying the facts, and each such correction landed on Xue Yue like a public rebuke. The estrangement that resulted between the two men was severe and lasting. By 1941, Xue had risen to command an entire war zone; Xiao remained an army commander under his authority. In the intervening years, Xiao had learned to be extremely cautious in all his dealings with his superior, acutely aware that any apparent failure or challenge might be held against him. On the night of September 19th, Xue Yue issued Xiao Zhichu an order to move the 26th Army to the second line of defense on the south bank of the Miluo River. Then, at noon on September 20th, he changed the order entirely: Xiao was to push his troops forward to the first line of defense along the riverbank, a more exposed position further north. At dawn on September 21st, Xiao Zhichu personally led his 44th Division—the division with which he had built his reputation—on a forced march toward the designated position. They were 2.5 kilometers from their destination, at the town of Wengjiang, when they encountered the Japanese 6th Division. The Japanese already knew they were coming. Having read Xue Yue's intercepted operational orders, they had deployed their forces specifically to intercept the 26th Army on the march. Within just twenty minutes of the initial encounter at Wengjiang, the entire 44th Division was completely surrounded. Xiao Zhichu reported the situation to Xue Yue by telephone. Xue Yue's response from the other end of the line was white-hot fury: "What's going on? We're surrounded before we even arrived! Why aren't we fighting? If we lose the Miluo River position, I'll kill you!" Xiao Zhichu swallowed his bitterness. Following orders, he threw the 44th Division into battle in terrain that could hardly have been more disadvantageous. They fought for a full day and a night and were unable to break through the encirclement. He ordered Wang Xiushen's 32nd Division to press forward and relieve the siege, but by the time those orders could be executed, the 32nd Division was itself under attack—surrounded on three sides by the Japanese 3rd Division at Wukou. Wang Xiushen led the entire division in a desperate battle with the river immediately at his back, suffering grievous casualties, and was eventually forced to fight his way clear rather than advance to relieve the 44th. On September 23rd, General Kanda Masazuka committed a portion of the 6th Division to a fierce assault against the rear of the already-encircled 44th Division. The situation became critical. Xiao Zhichu's army was fighting simultaneously on two fronts, and the lines were beginning to give way. It was only the timely intervention of Ding Zhipan's 41st Division, which arrived on a diagonal axis and struck the enemy threatening the 44th Division's rear, that prevented a complete collapse. When Ding Zhipan came to report to the army commander, the chief of staff of the 44th Division informed him with hollow composure that the entire division had suffered more than half casualties. The daily reality inside the encircled positions was one of sustained and grinding misery. During brief lulls in the fighting—stolen moments between one Japanese assault and the next—the soldiers would stuff a cold rice ball into their mouths and scoop up a mouthful of muddy water from the nearest roadside ditch; that was their meal. Immediately they would put down whatever they had in their hands and rush to reinforce the hastily dug earthworks, knowing another assault was imminent. The wounded lay where they had fallen, unable to be evacuated, their groans a constant sound beneath the work of digging and the distant thunder of artillery. The dead were not buried; there was simply no time. The battlefield was a scene of utter devastation. After Xiao Zhichu's repeated requests, Xue Yue finally authorized a withdrawal. The 26th Army was permitted to pull back to Putang, a position a few kilometers to the south with marginally more defensible terrain. The entire army moved overnight, arriving exhausted, and immediately began constructing new fortifications. They had barely caught their breath when the Japanese 40th and 6th Divisions came on in succession, pressing the pursuit without pause. The 41st and 44th Divisions threw themselves into the fighting and were decimated. After destroying those two divisions, the Japanese turned their full attention on the surviving 32nd Division and the army headquarters. As Xiao Zhichu swept his binoculars across the positions, watching his men lie on the ground—dead, dying, or fighting on sheer will—one phrase repeated itself in his mind: "total annihilation." It was the most despairing phrase in a soldier's vocabulary, and it seemed to be becoming a description of reality. On the evening of September 25th, as the Japanese ring tightened around the remnants of the 26th Army, a Japanese Chinese-language translator began calling out to the encircled troops in Mandarin, urging them to surrender. The entire army appeared to be at its final moment. Then, in the darkness, reinforcements arrived—in the most improbable way imaginable. The head of the army's reconnaissance section had slipped through the Japanese encirclement looking for any exit, and in doing so had stumbled upon an entire regiment of the 32nd Army that had completely lost contact with the headquarters days earlier. This regiment had suffered damage to its radio equipment and had simply not received any of the telegrams announcing changes to the army's deployment and assignments. When they arrived at their designated rendezvous point, the area was empty. They had been sending scouts in all directions trying to locate friendly forces and make sense of the situation, when they encountered the reconnaissance section chief who had been doing precisely the same thing from inside the encirclement. The two men compared unit designations and confirmed their identities. Then the section chief remembered something: the regiment's party representative was his own classmate from the Whampoa Military Academy. Old bonds held. The two men exchanged information, assessed the situation together, and without further deliberation the regimental commander led his troops on a forced march straight toward the guns. They found and struck the weakest points in the Japanese encirclement, broke through, and extracted the army headquarters and the surviving remnants of the 32nd Division. The 26th Army had been saved, but only barely, and at a terrible cost. What had before the battle been a formidable force with numerous victories was now reduced to less than one-fifth of its original strength. Wang Xiushen, commander of the 32nd Division, had previously served as commander of the great warlord Feng Yuxiang's own bodyguard brigade—a valiant and decorated general of the old Northwest Army. Division commanders Ding Zhipan and Chen Yong were similarly seasoned veterans, known for their courage and resourcefulness throughout years of hard fighting. After the battle, they and Army Commander Xiao Zhichu were utterly dejected. They had fought as hard as men could fight, under conditions as unfavorable as circumstances could devise, and they had been broken. More than forty kilometers to the west of the 26th Army's ordeal, at the point where the Miluo River flows into Dongting Lake, a second major engagement was being fought at the same time. Here, the Japanese 3rd and 4th Divisions struck at Chen Pei's 37th Army, whose two main fighting formations—Luo Qi's 95th Division and Li Tang's 140th Division—were deployed across the hills and river-network terrain of the area. The fighting was, by any measure, equally bloody and equally brutal. Before the battle, with their blood up and their honor committed, the commanders of the 37th Army's divisions had gathered their officers for ceremonies of dedication that spoke to the seriousness with which they understood what was coming. Li Tang, commander of the 140th Division, organized a frontline oath-taking ceremony at which he stood before his assembled officers and men and vowed aloud to annihilate the Japanese invaders and avenge the deaths of fallen compatriots. Luo Qi, commanding the 95th Division, sent written instructions throughout his formation: "The defense of the Shending Mountain line is not only a matter of honor for our division, but also a matter of victory or defeat for the entire battlefield. With this stubborn enemy pressing in, all our officers and soldiers should be even more courageous and loyal, resolutely defend the position, annihilate the Japanese invaders, and achieve extraordinary feats!" Song Ruike, who served at the time as a senior staff officer at the Ninth War Zone Command headquarters, recorded his recollection of the battle's progress in later years with the systematic precision that his professional training demanded. "On the morning of the 19th," Song recalled, "the enemy's main force successively advanced towards the Miluo River via Yanglin Street, Guanwang Bridge, and the Changhu-Dajing Street highway. Our 37th Army was on high alert on the south bank, while our vanguard troops were also advancing forward on the north bank. That afternoon, the enemy's vanguard encountered our troops north of Changle Street. After a fierce battle, many enemy soldiers were killed. Then, enemy cavalry and artillery, along with several thousand infantry, attacked from three sides. Our defending 1st Company fought a bloody battle, but due to being outnumbered, they suffered almost all casualties. Changle Street was occupied by the enemy. At around 7 p.m., the enemy began to attempt a crossing at Modao Beach. Our troops defending the south bank fought bravely and fought fiercely throughout the night, but the enemy failed." The first crossing attempt had been beaten back, but the respite was brief. Song continued: "At dawn on the 20th, the enemy, under the cover of aircraft and artillery, launched another forced crossing. At around 7 a.m., fierce fighting broke out between the two sides along the Wugongshi, Guiyi, and Hejiatang line." Those words, whatever courage the oaths and instructions had inspired, could not alter the underlying arithmetic of the battle. From the 21st through the 23rd of September, the 37th Army fought ferocious engagements with the Japanese 4th and 3rd Divisions across the Shending Mountain and Banjunmiao areas, absorbing casualties that could not be replaced. Song recorded the progression: "The main force of the enemy, advancing rapidly southward, captured our positions at Nanyangmiao and Banjunmiao in Wengjiang at noon on the 22nd. Our 140th Division engaged the enemy at Lishan Lane and Daxingling, and fought fiercely for two days and nights..." After the battle, the 37th Army had effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force. It had gone into the engagement with nearly fifty thousand fully equipped and manned troops. Song Ruike, reflecting on it all in his old age, acknowledged with unusual candor the limitations of his own account: "Since history cannot be reproduced, people summarize events based on memory, striving to retain the most important and valuable aspects while filtering out the unimportant and those that do not reflect the essence." The elderly Song retained the factual architecture of the battle—times, places, unit designations, tactical methods—but he knew, as any honest chronicler must, that within those facts lay a multitude of individual experiences, individual sufferings, individual deaths, that no record could fully capture. "Then what about every individual in history?" he asked. "How should their emotions, will, beliefs, their flesh and blood, their breath, and everything they sacrificed be expressed and entrusted to us?" It was a question he could not answer, and neither can history. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. After commander Zhao Zili's plan was rejected, he drafted orders anyway, but Lieutenant Colonel Hachimō of Japan's 11th Army intercepted and decoded the Ninth War Zone's deployment orders on September 20. Meanwhile, the 37th Army fought the Japanese at the Miluo River confluence with Dongting Lake, launching oaths and grim defenses before being effectively destroyed as a combat force.

In this Sunday interview, Brad Onishi is joined by historian and author Warren Throckmorton to discuss his new book, The Christian Past That Wasn't: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History. Together they examine some of the most persistent myths at the heart of Christian nationalism: that America was founded as a covenant nation, that the colonies' state churches prove the United States is inherently Christian, and that the Founders intended to establish a Christian government. Warren explains why these claims collapse under historical scrutiny while revealing how Christian nationalists flatten centuries of history into a single political narrative designed to justify power today. The conversation also explores the outsized influence of pseudo-historian David Barton, whose revisionist accounts of the American founding continue to shape churches, political leaders, and organizations despite repeated factual debunking. Brad and Warren unpack why these myths persist, how they fuel white Christian nationalism and Christian supremacy, and what is at stake as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary. This is an essential conversation for anyone seeking to understand the historical foundations of today's Christian nationalist movement—and why telling the truth about America's past matters for the country's future. https://www.christianpast.com The Christian Past That Wasn't: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889835820/The-Christian-Past-That-Wasn-t Support independent religion and politics journalism:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://axismundinetwork.substack.com... Donate today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.axismundi.us/fundraise?hs... Listen to the Axis Daily Brief: Axis Daily Brief on Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Axis Daily Brief on Spotify: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/033zp4M... Axis Daily Brief RSS Feed: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast... Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Thursday's Mark Levin Show, what made the Declaration of Independence remarkable was that it was unprecedented in human history. The Declaration serves as the foundational basis for the nation and its Constitution, celebrating America's purpose. Critics like Presidents Obama and Woodrow Wilson have rejected or downplayed its first part on the Creator and principles, focusing instead on the list of grievances against the king to advance new ideologies; however, President Coolidge defended these enduring, universal ideas from Aristotle and Locke as perpetual, not to be dismissed. The Declaration's concise statement of American identity is incompatible with Marxism, Islamism, and fascism. Also, President Reagan was a great admirer and friend of Milton Friedman. He often sought his input on economic policies. During Reagan's presidency, there was massive economic growth, and he won two historic landslide elections, popular vote and electoral college, like no Republican before or since. Alexander Hamilton would grow increasingly supportive of a powerful central government. He would argue with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on their approaches to government during the Washington administration and beyond. Hamilton argued for implied powers under the Constitution, which infuriated Jefferson and Madison. Hamilton claimed the necessary and proper clause was essentially a ticket to significantly expanding federal action. Later, Americanism and capitalism are philosophies enabling individual decision-making under the Declaration and Constitution, whereas ideologies are fanatical beliefs imposed society-wide regardless of consequences. Communism is defective and anti-human, misreading human nature by suppressing free will, reason, debate, and academic freedom in favor of brainwashing, conformity, and central control, as seen in places like Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and China, and similarly with Islamists. Nationalists, populists, and Marxists attack the American experiment, economic system, and culture through emotion, slogans of equality, and activist government, showing overlaps reminiscent of 1930s fascists and communists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Last time we spoke about the battle of Zhongtiao Mountain. On 7 May 1941, Japan launched a three-front assault on the Zhongtiao Mountains, striking multiple axes and using paratroopers to disrupt Chinese command. On the northeastern front, Wu Shimin's 98th Army scored a success at Wangcun, routing about 2,000 attackers. Elsewhere, three-pronged Japanese forces drove south toward Yuanqu with overwhelming artillery, armor, and coordinated movement. During the first night, paratroopers found the Chinese headquarters already disordered: orders were unclear and communications with most units collapsed. By 8 May, the First War Zone could no longer coordinate; armies fought alone. From mid-May into June, Japanese units swept the mountains, manning river crossings to block retreat and eliminating pockets. Surviving Chinese formations escaped or regrouped south of the Yellow River, but the three-year Zhongtiao defensive system was destroyed in about twenty days, sharply worsening Japan's strategic situation in northern China.   #208 Operation Plus: The Road to the Second Battle of Changsha Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. In the autumn of 1939, Japanese forces under General Yasuji Okamura launched a major offensive aimed at capturing Changsha — the gateway to China's interior and one of the most important cities still under Nationalist control. The First Battle of Changsha ended without a decisive Japanese victory. Chinese forces, anchored by the Ninth War Zone under General Xue Yue, managed to repel the advance, inflicting significant casualties and preserving the city. It was a notable achievement at a time when Japanese arms had swept across vast swathes of Chinese territory, and it reverberated through both the Chinese military establishment and the watching international community. Following the Japanese withdrawal, Chiang Kai-shek convened the Second Nanyue Military Conference to carry out a thorough assessment of the battle and to plan for the period of relative calm that would follow. The conference sought to answer several pressing questions: What had worked in the defense? Where had coordination broken down? How could the period of Japanese inactivity be used most productively? Chiang made it clear that this respite was not to be wasted. Commanders of all the major war zones were simultaneously expected to serve as governors of their respective provinces, ensuring unity of military and civilian command. Chiang himself set an example by personally assuming the governorship of Sichuan Province and focusing attention on that province's production and reconstruction efforts. The conference produced broad directives for the reconstruction of war-zone provinces and the intensification of military training. For Hunan, responsibility for implementing these directives fell on the shoulders of General Xue Yue, who had emerged from the First Battle of Changsha with greatly enhanced prestige and authority. The reason Changsha and Hunan more broadly attracted such persistent Japanese attention was geographical and logistical. The Yuehan Railway — running from Yueyang in northern Hunan down through Changsha and south toward Guangzhou — was one of the most important transportation arteries in China. Whoever controlled it could move troops, equipment, and supplies across vast distances with speed and reliability. Opening up the Yuehan line would, in Japanese strategic thinking, effectively connect their forces in Central China with those in South China, allowing for a gradual tightening of the strategic noose around Chiang Kai-shek's wartime capital at Chongqing in Sichuan Province. Hunan was therefore not merely a defensive problem for the Chinese; it was a strategic prize that Japan would inevitably seek to take. Xue Yue, whose headquarters were in Changsha, was well aware of this logic. With the First Battle of Changsha behind him and the province in need of recovery, Xue Yue turned his attention to governance. He was not content to wait passively for the next Japanese offensive. He believed that a province that was economically productive, administratively disciplined, and politically stable would provide a far more durable foundation for military resistance than one that was disorganized and demoralized. At the beginning of his tenure as effective governor of Hunan, Xue conducted a thorough survey of the province's situation and then articulated a philosophical framework for his administration in the form of a "three-character policy," consisting of three guiding principles: "Peace"  (an), "Convenience" (bian), and "Sufficiency" ( zu). In Xue's formulation, "Peace" meant that the population should be able to live, work, and conduct their daily affairs free from fear and disruption. "Convenience" meant that policies should benefit the people, the nation, and the war effort simultaneously — eliminating bureaucratic obstacles and inefficiencies. "Sufficiency" meant achieving adequate levels in all essential areas: enough soldiers, enough food, and enough wisdom in leadership. These seemingly simple principles were elaborated into extensive implementation guidelines. The announcement of this framework immediately sparked debate across Hunan's intellectual and administrative community. Veteran officials and scholars were divided. Some praised the policy as a clear and practical framework for wartime governance. Others dismissed it as hollow wordplay, offering nothing new or substantive. A minority was more sharply critical, warning that if such superficial philosophizing was all Xue could offer, the province would decay into warlordism. Undeterred by the criticism, Xue Yue built upon the three-character framework with a set of "Six Policies" for governing the people of Hunan: "Benefiting the People, Raising the People, Educating the People, Protecting the People, Managing the People, and Utilizing the People." Each of these six principles came with specific implementation targets and performance metrics, designed to be measurable rather than aspirational. This second round of policy announcements generated yet another wave of debate, but Xue pressed forward with implementation regardless. From the beginning of 1940, Xue vigorously pushed for the expansion of agricultural and industrial production across the province. His approach was comprehensive and at times uncompromising. He approved funds for the reconstruction of the Zhongshan Road National Goods Exhibition Hall in Changsha — which had been destroyed in the catastrophic Changsha Fire of 1938 — and by February 1940, 114 shops had reopened there. In March, he approved the "Eight Measures for the Construction of Sheds in Changsha," drafted by the Changsha Municipal Police Bureau, which relaxed housing regulations and helped address the severe shortage of accommodation for the city's residents, who had largely fled or been displaced during the fire and the Japanese offensive. One of the more creative initiatives of this period was the Ninth War Zone's order requiring all troops stationed in Hunan to cultivate a certain amount of farmland in their spare time, growing grain to supplement military rations. Local residents came to refer to the plots tended by soldiers as "soldier's fields" (bing tian). This policy served a dual purpose: it reduced the logistical burden of feeding the garrison forces from civilian stocks while keeping soldiers productively occupied during lulls in fighting. It also served to maintain a degree of goodwill between the military and the rural communities on which any prolonged resistance ultimately depended. One of the most consequential steps Xue Yue took to stabilize Hunan's governance was an aggressive campaign against corruption. On April 15, 1940, he ordered the execution of Tian Weizheng, the county magistrate of Changsha, and Wang Lun, the county magistrate of Xiangtan, both on charges of corruption and abuse of office. The proclamation accompanying the executions was blunt: "This serves as a warning against corruption and establishes the authority of the law in upholding discipline." The message was not lost on officials across the province. In the months that followed, a sweep of investigations led to the punishment of numerous corrupt officials and illegal businessmen. The effect on public confidence in the provincial government was significant. Citizens and soldiers alike perceived that there was now a leadership willing to hold its own accountable — a stark contrast to the corruption and self-dealing that had plagued Chinese provincial governance throughout the war. Xue was also attentive to the ideological dimension of the war effort. On May Fourth Youth Day — itself laden with nationalist significance, commemorating the great student movement of 1919 — Xue attended the provincial capital's sports meet and delivered a speech before thousands of young people entitled "Iron Youth, Iron Spirit, Sacred Labor, Sacred Survival." The speech was aimed at galvanizing the younger generation, connecting their personal futures to the fate of the nation and the resistance against Japan. That same month, in May 1940, the 110th executive meeting of the Hunan Provincial Government revised and approved the "Hunan Province County Heads Performance Evaluation Method," a document that formalized military service and support for the war effort as the primary criterion in the evaluation of local officials' political performance. Throughout 1940, the provincial government and the Ninth War Zone organized a series of training courses for officials, including courses specifically designed for guerrilla cadres, women cadres, and village chiefs — an indication that preparations for sustained, decentralized resistance were underway. Xue himself addressed the cadre training group with a speech on "The Conditions That a Well-Rounded Cadre Should Possess." By the end of 1940, after more than a year of sustained effort, Hunan had broadly recovered to the administrative and economic condition it had enjoyed before the Changsha Fire, when the reformist official Zhang Zhizhong had governed the province. Agriculture, industry, and commerce all showed measurable improvement over their wartime lows. The government's accounts for the year reflected growth across all sectors. This recovery was not merely statistical; it represented a genuine rebuilding of the province's capacity to sustain a prolonged defense. Soldiers were better fed and equipped, local officials were more disciplined, and the civilian population had a functioning, if still imperfect, relationship with the wartime state. Early in 1941, Xue Yue's reputation had grown to the point where local gentry and public figures jointly petitioned for a bustling street in Changsha to be named after his courtesy name — a mark of genuine popular esteem unusual for a military governor in wartime China. While Xue Yue was rebuilding Hunan, events at the geopolitical level were reshaping the strategic environment in ways that would directly precipitate the Second Battle of Changsha. On September 27, 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, formally joining the Axis powers. The pact alarmed the Western democracies and accelerated their support for China. On December 2, 1940, the United States Congress passed a bill approving a one-hundred-million-dollar loan to China. On December 10, 1940, Britain followed suit, approving a ten-million-pound loan. Both measures were explicitly understood — by all parties — as responses to Japanese expansion and Japan's recognition of Wang Jingwei's collaborationist puppet government in Nanjing. For the Japanese military leadership, these loans signaled that the international community was not prepared to accept Japan's fait accompli in China, and that the war of attrition against the Nationalist government could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. The imperative to resolve the "China Incident" — as Japanese officials euphemistically called the war — before the international situation deteriorated further became more urgent than ever. On January 16, 1941, the Japanese Army adopted the "Long-Term Operational Guidance Plan for China." The document acknowledged a painful internal contradiction: Japan could only sustain a protracted war in China, yet it simultaneously demanded a swift resolution to the conflict through strong military pressure. The plan's solution to this contradiction was to intensify operations while "taking note of the international situation" — meaning that military actions should be calibrated to avoid triggering direct American or British intervention. The plan called for large-scale offensive operations in the summer and autumn of 1941. The companion document, the "Annual Plan for Showa 16 (1941)," was more specific. It required Japanese troops stationed in China to conduct a major operation in the summer and autumn of that year with the aim of dealing a heavy blow to the main force of the "Whampoa Military Academy" — the term used by Japanese planners to describe the core of Chiang Kai-shek's professional officer corps, trained at the Whampoa (Huangpu) Military Academy and regarded as the backbone of the Nationalist army. The stated goal was to destroy the Chongqing government's will to continue resistance and thereby force a resolution to the China Incident. Xue Yue himself read translated summaries of both these documents when he traveled to Chongqing to report on his work in early 1941. He returned to Hunan in a reflective, and determined, frame of mind. For much of the period between the two Battles of Changsha, the Japanese Eleventh Army — the primary force facing Xue Yue's Ninth War Zone — had been commanded by General Yasuji Okamura, a seasoned officer with whom Xue had developed a degree of familiarity through combat. By early 1941, it became known that Okamura was to be transferred to the Military Advisory Council at Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo — a prestigious but more removed role. Xue Yue reflected on this change with a mixture of relief and characteristic self-confidence, reasoning that whoever replaced Okamura would be a new adversary to be dealt with on the battlefield, and that there was no reason to lose to him regardless. Korechika Anami received his appointment as commander of the Eleventh Army on February 15, 1941. From the first day of his appointment, he carried a detailed battle map of the three provinces facing his command — Hunan, Hubei, and Jiangxi — along with comprehensive intelligence files on both sides' troop dispositions and strengths. He studied these materials constantly, on trains, in waiting rooms, wherever he had a free moment. By the time he formally took up his post on March 10, 1941, he already had a clear operational vision for the coming campaign. Before reaching the front, Anami stopped in Nanjing to meet with General Hata Shunroku, the Commander-in-Chief of the China Expeditionary Army. Hata had himself arrived in China in early 1941, having been summoned by the Emperor before his departure and entrusted with what the Emperor called the sacred mission of resolving the China Incident. The two men talked through the night, their conversation returning repeatedly to the planned summer-autumn offensive. Hata urged Anami to annihilate the main force of the Ninth War Zone in the area south of the Miluo River — to destroy, once and for all, the core of Chiang Kai-shek's best troops. "If this battle is fought well," Hata told him, "the entire war situation in China will undergo a huge change." Anami listened and agreed, though he had his own reasons to want the battle to go well. He had voluntarily relinquished the prominent position of Vice Minister of the Army at General Headquarters in Tokyo to take this field command — a significant personal sacrifice that reflected his deep desire for battlefield achievement. There was a personal dimension to Anami's motivations as well. His second son, a bright and lively boy to whom he was deeply attached, had died in combat in China. Anami carried a photograph of his son wherever he went, and had resolved to transform his grief into a consuming commitment to military excellence, whatever the human cost. At the Eleventh Army's headquarters in Yueyang, Anami found the war game board and operational plans that Okamura had left behind. He did not immediately begin issuing orders. Instead, for weeks he immersed himself in the problem, traveling between divisional headquarters and subordinate commands to gather ground-level perspectives, or sitting alone for hours before the great map, motionless and in deep concentration. His new chief of staff, Kinoshita Isamu, who had come from a divisional unit and was unfamiliar with his commander's temperament, could only keep silent company during these long sessions. When Anami eventually convened his headquarters personnel to explain his operational intentions, he made a pointed critique of the First Battle of Changsha. "The reason why the last battle in Changsha did not achieve great results," he said, "was that the troops were too dispersed and the main direction of attack was not highlighted, so they could not form a strong impact and lethality." He named the new operation "Operation Plus" — a deliberate contrast with what he saw as the subtracted, diluted efforts of the previous campaign. His concept was one of radical concentration: rather than dispersing the attack across multiple fronts in Hubei and Jiangxi while simultaneously advancing on Changsha, Anami proposed pulling the forces from southern Hubei and northern Jiangxi and massing them in front of northern Hunan. The effect on his staff officers when he demonstrated this redeployment on the map was electric; one of them involuntarily exclaimed aloud at the sudden clarity of the advantageous position that mass concentration would create. Anami's personality was, in the judgment of those who worked with him, fundamentally different from Okamura's. A commander's fighting style is shaped by his character, and Anami's character was defined by intensity, focus, and a willingness to commit fully. These traits would shape "Operation Plus" from conception to execution. On June 22, 1941, five and a half million German troops launched Operation Barbarossa — the largest military invasion in history — against the Soviet Union. The news reached the Japanese military establishment with a degree of surprise, since such a momentous operation should, under the terms of the Tripartite Pact, have been communicated in advance. Beyond the procedural slight, German strategists had placed themselves in the position of fighting a two-front war, something Japanese generals found strategically bewildering. The outbreak of the Soviet-German War forced a serious debate within the Japanese General Staff. One faction argued for a "northward advance" — seizing the opportunity to strike the Soviet Union from the east while its military was fully committed in the west. Another faction argued for a "southward advance" — moving into Southeast Asia and the Pacific to secure the oil and raw materials that Japan desperately needed. Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe adopted a wait-and-see compromise, authorizing secret preparations for war in the north known as Operation Kantokuen while continuing to monitor developments. Now it just so happens I released a Patreon/Youtube Members exclusive episode covering Operation Kantokuen the previous month. I highly recommend it, fascinating what if piece of history. For just a teaser I can briefly summarize it: Operation Kantokuen — officially designated "Kwantung Army Special Maneuvers" — was Japan's plan for a large-scale invasion of the Soviet Far East, developed in the summer of 1941 following Germany's launch of Operation Barbarossa. When news of the German invasion reached Tokyo, Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka and senior Kwantung Army officers argued Japan should abandon its neutrality pact with the USSR and strike in coordination with Germany. An Army-Navy compromise on June 24th allowed preparations to proceed so long as they did not interfere with Japan's concurrent southern ambitions. On July 5th, Matsuoka and Major General Shin'ichi Tanaka convinced War Minister Hideki Tojo to back a more ambitious scheme, and the two men then bypassed the War Ministry entirely, securing Emperor Hirohito's personal authorization. The plan was structured in two stages — a buildup and readiness phase followed by an offensive phase — during which the Kwantung Army would await an explicit order to attack. The Army General Staff calculated that any campaign had to conclude by mid-October before Siberian winter conditions made logistics impossible. Their ideal force requirement was 16 to 22 divisions supported by 800,000 tons of shipping, though this assumed the Soviets would first redeploy half their Far Eastern infantry and two-thirds of their armor westward against Germany. The planned order of battle ultimately settled on 24 divisions — 17 committed to the eastern front and 5 concentrated near Mutanchiang. The opening blow was designed to fall on the Primorye (Maritime Province) front. The 1st Area Army, commanding the 3rd and 20th Armies along with elements of the Korea Army, would cross the border south of Lake Khanka to shatter Soviet defensive lines and menace Vladivostok. Simultaneously, the 5th Army would strike south of Iman to cut the Trans-Siberian Railway and isolate the Maritime Province from northern reinforcements. In the north, the 4th Army would hold the Amur River line before pivoting to attack Blagoveshchensk, while two additional reinforced divisions would invade Northern Sakhalin in a land-and-sea pincer. A second phase envisioned capturing Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk, and Sovetskaya Gavan, with amphibious operations considered against Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Kamchatka itself. The operation was to be supported by a massive air assault — between 1,800 and 2,700 aircraft combining Army and Navy aviation — aimed at annihilating the Soviet Far East Air Force in the opening hours, after which Japanese air power would shift to tactical ground support and interdiction of Soviet supply lines. Armored assets included roughly 800–900 tanks, mostly Type 97 Chi-Has and Type 95 Ha-Gos. Kantokuen was also allocated chemical weapons stockpiled in Manchuria and biological agents produced by Unit 731, intended for deployment against Soviet rear areas and supply lines. Despite the scale of planning, the operation was already fatally compromised before it could be launched. Japan's industry and logistics could not sustain a two-front war while remaining bogged down in China. On August 1st, 1941, the United States enacted a total oil embargo that cut off 80% of Japan's fuel supply, and the Dutch East Indies followed. With oil reserves sufficient for only 12–18 months of peacetime consumption, a Siberian offensive that would consume an estimated one to two million barrels per month was no longer tenable. By August 9th, the Army General Staff conceded that seizing the oil-rich territories of Southeast Asia was the overriding strategic priority. The Kantokuen buildup was formally terminated, and Japan turned south — setting the course toward Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War. Now Kantokuen held some practical consequences for the China Expeditionary Army was disruptive. Serious consideration was given to redeploying units of the Eleventh Army away from their positions facing Hunan and northward toward Manchuria, in anticipation of a possible war with the Soviet Union. This threatened to derail Anami's planning entirely. The cloud of uncertainty hung over the Changsha operation for several weeks. Despite the disruption, Anami refused to let the operation be indefinitely deferred. On June 24, 1941 — just two days after Barbarossa began — he formally approved the operational guidance outline for the Changsha offensive and set a planned launch date of September 15. This was an act of deliberate institutional pressure: by formalizing the plan so quickly in the wake of Barbarossa, Anami made it harder for higher authorities to redirect his forces northward without explicitly cancelling a plan already in motion. The gamble worked. The northward deployment option was ultimately shelved, and the Eleventh Army remained in place to conduct its summer-autumn offensive. While Anami and his staff at Yueyang bent over their map of Hunan, so too did Xue Yue and his staff at Changsha. Two nearly identical colored military maps were laid out on large tables in two different command centers — one in Chinese, one in Japanese — showing the same terrain of Hunan, southern Hubei, and western Jiangxi. The Xiang River appeared on both as a green ribbon; Dongting Lake as a blue maple leaf. For those responsible for commanding the impending battle, the war game was the battle, played out in simulation before blood was shed. Xue Yue, his Chief of Staff Wu Yizhi, Chief of Staff Zhao Zili, and the intelligence and operations officers of the Ninth War Zone Command engaged in extensive map exercises throughout the summer of 1941. Wargaming pieces bearing unit designations moved across the terrain as staff officers reported troop strengths, timings, and geographic objectives. The summer heat was intense, and there was nowhere cool in Changsha; Xue and his staff worked in the heat, sweating heavily as they played out scenario after scenario. It was during these sessions that Xue came to believe he had grasped the essential shape of the Japanese plan. Reasoning from the known Japanese strategic posture and the pattern of the first battle, he concluded that the enemy would again advance roughly the same way. His counter-strategy was as follows: in northern Jiangxi and southern Hubei, the war zone would launch pincer attacks on Japanese forces that were not part of the main offensive, targeting the area north of Chongren and Xingan, east of Yichun, Wanzai, Tonggu, and Xiushui, to defeat them in detail. In northern Hunan — the main theater — the war zone would deliberately allow the Japanese to advance, luring their main force south of the Miluo River into the area north of Jinjing, Fulinpu, and Sanjieqiao, and then launch a devastating counterattack to encircle and annihilate them. After a successful counterattack, Xue imagined pursuing the broken Japanese forces all the way back to Yueyang, and beyond — even, in his more expansive moments, recapturing the great cities of Jiujiang and Wuhan, lost in 1938. This was the "lure and annihilate" strategy, and it was not merely a hope — it was the formal operational order issued to the forces of the Ninth War Zone. In August 1941, the Ninth Military Front officially assessed that Japan intended to capture Changsha and obtain supplies, and the lure-and-annihilate plan was formalized accordingly. What Xue Yue did not know — and could not know through his intelligence network alone — was that Anami's operational philosophy was fundamentally different from Okamura's. The critical assumption underlying the lure-and-annihilate plan was that the Japanese would attack in roughly the same dispersed, multi-front pattern as the first battle. Anami's "Operation Plus" invalidated this assumption entirely. By concentrating his forces in front of northern Hunan rather than dispersing them, Anami would strike with an impact Xue's cordon defenses were not designed to absorb. Xue was, unknowingly, planning to fight a replay of the first battle against an opponent who had studied that first battle as a case study in what not to do. Despite this fundamental intelligence gap, the Chinese were not without information. From mid-August 1941 onward, residents of mountain villages and riverside communities in northern Jiangxi and southern Hubei began reporting unusual nighttime activity. Faint sounds of motor engines and the footsteps of large columns moving on main roads were heard after dark. On moonlit nights, fleets of motorboats were seen moving without lights on the rivers, visible only as dark shadows on the water. The local population was puzzled and unsettled: what kind of unit was this, and what were they doing? The answer was that Anami's forces were conducting their pre-offensive assembly under cover of darkness and strict light discipline, moving four divisions totaling approximately 120,000 troops into position for the attack on Hunan. Military and civilian intelligence agents operating in these areas crouched in the bushes, enduring insect bites through long nights, watching and recording everything they witnessed. The information was relayed by human chain, passed from one agent to another across a network stretching back to Changsha, until it was collated and placed on Xue Yue's desk by staff officers from the Ninth War Zone Command's Intelligence Department. Xue studied the reports carefully, comparing them against his map. The evidence of a large Japanese build-up in northern Hunan was unambiguous. But Xue was suspicious of its implications. "Mobilize troops? All the troops are moved to northern Hunan. What about Tongcheng? What about Yueyang? Impossible! Feint? What does that mean? You want me to concentrate my troops in northern Hunan so you can attack from both sides?" His staff officers were similarly uncertain how to read the intelligence. The scale of the Japanese concentration defied the pattern of previous operations, and Xue's trained instincts — calibrated against years of dealing with Okamura — led him to doubt what his intelligence was plainly showing. He concluded, without firm evidence, that the concentration must be a feint or a deception. On August 26, 1941, Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo issued Mainland Order No. 538, which authorized the Commander-in-Chief of the China Expeditionary Army to "temporarily conduct operations beyond the designated operational area in Central China during the summer and autumn." This order provided the formal imperial sanction for the Changsha offensive, lifting any remaining bureaucratic constraints on Anami's operational plan. It represented the final piece of institutional authorization, completing a chain that stretched from Anami's June 24 approval of the operational outline through Hata's advocacy at the China Expeditionary Army level to the formal imprimatur of the Imperial General Headquarters. With Mainland Order No. 538 in hand, the Eleventh Army's final preparations could proceed without ambiguity. The original planned launch date of September 15 would in practice be moved forward, with combat beginning on September 7 — itself a date chosen partly to maximize the advantage of late-summer weather conditions in the Hunan river-crossing terrain. By the time Anami's forces were assembled, the operational force was formidable. Estimating that the enemy facing them comprised fifteen divisions from the Chinese 4th, 37th, 99th, 74th, and 26th Corps, Japanese planners calculated — somewhat optimistically — that two infantry battalions would suffice to handle one enemy division. To provide a margin for error and to ensure decisive striking power, the Eleventh Army committed forty-one infantry battalions distributed across four full divisions and three specialized task forces, supported by twenty-nine artillery battalions. This represented a massive concentration of firepower and manpower along a relatively narrow axis of advance, precisely as Anami had intended. The objective was clearly stated: "to deal a major blow to the Ninth Military Front in order to thwart the enemy's plan for resistance." Japanese senior leadership reiterated at every briefing that the mission was emphatically not territorial — the army was not to occupy Changsha or secure it for long-term administration, and it was not to forage for supplies. The goal was destruction of Chinese combat power. On the Chinese side, the Ninth Military Front had not been idle. Since the Battle of Shanggao in March 1941 — a significant Chinese defensive victory in Jiangxi that had inflicted heavy casualties on Japanese forces attempting to advance into the province — the Ninth Military Front had ordered its troops to cooperate with guerrilla units operating in the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi border region, conducting harassment operations against Japanese logistics and communications. This cooperation served both to maintain offensive pressure and to train the irregular forces that would prove invaluable in a war of attrition. By August 1941, Xue Yue had assembled a force of thirty-five divisions organized into thirteen armies across three army groups, totaling 378,307 troops. The headquarters of the Ninth Military Front remained in Changsha. Xue had also assessed his forces' combat readiness with some confidence: in the summer of 1940, the Ninth War Zone had dispatched one corps from each army group and one division from each corps on summer offensive operations against Japanese positions, explicitly testing their readiness in real combat. Although no major victories had been achieved in those operations, the exercise confirmed that troop morale was high and that combat effectiveness had recovered to the level of the First Battle of Changsha. If anything, Xue thought, after another full year of training, they should be better. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. Operation Plus, emphasized concentrating forces and creating a decisive breakthrough rather than dispersing attacks across multiple fronts like in earlier battles. On the Chinese side, commander Xue Yue developed a "lure and annihilate" strategy, expecting the Japanese to fight like before; however, Anami's concentrated approach undermined these assumptions, making a Chinese counteroffensive far harder to execute.

WarRoom Battleground EP 1035: WarRoom Sits Down With Twitter Celebrity “Raw Egg Nationalist” To Talk GREAT REPLACEMENT

With Frank under the weather this week, Dan takes the reins solo for a special live-stream edition of Thank God I'm Atheist. Along the way he digs into Christian nationalists attempting to build a new religious stronghold in Washington state, revisits the ongoing debate over whether Mormons are considered Christian by their evangelical neighbors, and looks at Donald Trump's latest honor from an Orthodox Christian leader. Dan also checks in on the Ark Encounter as it approaches its tenth anniversary, discusses new Catholic abuse-prevention guidelines, celebrates the return of the infamous Route 666 to Hell, and spends plenty of time chatting with listeners from around the world. Support the show! www.thankgodimatheist.com/donate