You are ordered to support the War of Resistance against Japan; China enters Level 1 combat readines

"Please come this way, everyone. We have prepared accommodations for you to rest and recuperate."

Kaohsiung City's Kusada turned to the side and raised his hand in a guiding gesture.

The group walked through the dock area and turned into the main street of Jiaodong City.

The sunlight slanted in from the east, gilding the gray bricks and tiles on both sides of the street with a pale golden light.

The streets were clean, without the mountains of garbage and overflowing sewage typical of port cities, and there were no naked children chasing after foreigners for coins.

The shops along the street were all open, selling cloth, blacksmithing, and repairing clocks, each busy with their own business. Occasionally, a housewife would come out of the alley with a shopping basket, catch a glimpse of the group of foreigners in suits, and then just give them a cursory glance before continuing on her way.

There were no onlookers, no pointing fingers, and certainly no fawning smiles like those commonly seen in colonies.

It was as if these uninvited guests with blond hair and blue eyes were nothing more than a few extra telephone poles on the street, not bothering them at all.

This calm itself is a silent arrogance, more unsettling than any diplomatic rhetoric.

Then they saw patrolling soldiers.

A group of soldiers in gray-green uniforms were marching in formation from across the street.

White had never seen the style of the military uniform before. It wasn't the British khaki, the American olive green, or the German field gray, but a color between gray and green, with a rough texture.

The shoulder and collar insignia are designed in a simple and neat style, without any superfluous tassels or ribbons, yet they exude an air of quiet authority and imposing power.

Each soldier carried an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, its barrel gleaming with a cold metallic sheen, and its magazines were full and rounded, a stark contrast to the standard rifles still used on the European battlefields that relied on bolt action.

The soldiers' steps were not fast, but each step was in sync with the rhythm, and the sound of their footsteps was as uniform as a metronome.

Even the range of their arm swings, the height of their leg lifts, and the direction of their gazes were completely identical!

They all look so uniform, like a whole row of copied and pasted people!

White's smile faded the moment he saw the patrol team.

He has served as the special envoy for Far Eastern affairs for several years. What kind of army hasn't he seen?

He had seen elite divisions of the Japanese Kwantung Army, Gurkha mercenaries of the British colonial forces in India, and German-equipped divisions of the Central Army of the Yamashiro.

However, the Kwantung Army was fierce but lacked discipline, the British Indian Army was disciplined but physically weak, and the German-equipped divisions were well-equipped but always exuded an inexplicable sense of lethargy.

But he had never seen soldiers like the one in front of him.

Their physiques were not the thin and weak East Asians that Europeans stereotyped them to be. Instead, they had broad shoulders, thick backs, and straight backs. Their military uniforms were stretched taut by their chest muscles and shoulders, and the bulging veins on their forearms were faintly visible when the sleeves were rolled up.

This physique would be comparable to that of an elite division in the German Wehrmacht.

What alarmed White even more were the sheer number and widespread use of those automatic rifles—a number that even the Imperial Army might not be able to match.

Most of their soldiers were still using M1 Garand semi-automatic rifles, while the patrol soldiers each had a fully automatic rifle.

Are you kidding me?

Are the patrolling soldiers stronger than their royal guards?

Having worked in diplomacy for many years, White knows that the quality of a country's military often reflects its true strength better than any economic data.

The economy can be faked, factories can boast, but the military cannot be lied to.

A soldier's gaze, gait, muscle definition, and gun-holding posture are things that money can't buy; they are honed little by little through time, training, and real combat.

Every detail of the patrol team in front of him told him the same thing: this was an army that had been repeatedly tempered by war, not the kind of pampered soldiers who had been cooped up in the barracks for three years, but veterans who had fought their way up on the battlefield.

He turned his head and glanced at Lieutenant Colonel Mike out of the corner of his eye.

The professional soldier's expression became even more serious, and his right hand unconsciously fastened to the buckle on his belt.

White had seen him in this posture before; it was the focus and alertness he displayed when studying battle maps.

They exchanged a knowing glance, neither speaking, but both reading the same message in each other's eyes:

What Mr. Shen was holding in his hand was far more than just a few advanced individual weapons.

Previously, the American intelligence system had received reports that a well-equipped and well-trained armed force had emerged in the Far East, but those reports were buried at the bottom of the Pentagon's archives and no one took them seriously.

What kind of fighting power can an army have that struggles so much to fight a Japanese soldier?

This is a view that is almost unanimously held by decision-makers in Washington.

But now, when they saw this army march past them, they were all stunned.

Morgan walked in the middle of the group, his expression less solemn than White's and Lieutenant Colonel MacArthur's, but the fingers holding his cigar unconsciously tightened.

He wasn't a soldier and didn't understand things like infantry-tank coordination or firepower configuration, but he understood people.

He has met the world's top talents on Wall Street, the world's most dazzling stars in Hollywood, and the world's most cunning politicians in the Senate.

He has an instinctive ability to judge people's temperament.

The spirit emanating from these soldiers was not the subservience of colonial troops, the ruthlessness of mercenaries, or the banditry of warlord private soldiers.

That's the unique quality of a soldier who knows why he's fighting!

He had seen this kind of temperament in the honor guard at West Point and in the honor guards of the Marine Corps, but he never thought he would see it on the streets of a small town in the Far East.

The group exchanged glances discreetly, and the initial underestimation they had harbored subsided almost entirely, replaced by a heightened sense of vigilance.

The morale, weaponry, and discipline of this unit are in no way inferior to the elite infantry of the US military, and in fact, they are even more formidable in their iron will.

Further south, as you pass through the southern part of the city, a patch of charred ruins comes into view.

The collapsed warehouses, the charred wooden beams, and the grain residue mixed with charcoal ash on the ground created a scene of utter devastation, with a faint smell of burning still lingering in the air.

"This is... the granary has been blown up?"

Morgan stopped, tilted his head to examine the ruins, and slowly the corners of his mouth turned up. Then he laughed.

"With so many elite soldiers and such good weaponry, they couldn't even defend their own food supply?"

He laughed and shook his head, putting the cigar back in his mouth, putting his hands in his suit pockets, and his tone returned to that condescending contempt.

"It seems our worries were completely unnecessary. What good are the best weapons if they're in the hands of people who don't know how to fight? They're no different from firewood."

White laughed too.

"God bless! China is still China. It's a pity about all that good equipment; it would have been better to send it to where it's meant to be."

Lieutenant Colonel Mike was the last to smile.

As a professional soldier, he had an instinctive sensitivity to attacks on his rear.

Conversely, this also confirms a judgment he has long firmly believed in:

"Eastern armies will always only know how to fight on paper! Equipment can be bought, physique can be trained, and formations can be practiced, but combat concepts are something that cannot be learned."

"What do we teach at West Point? We teach fire coordination, infantry-tank cooperation, and air-ground integration. Even if you gave them a hundred years, they still wouldn't learn these things!"

How could the combat concepts of a tiny nation like China possibly compare to those of the century-old Imperial Army?

The three of them exchanged a glance and laughed at the same time.

The invisible pressure from the patrol team vanished in an instant.

The sick man of East Asia is still the sick man of East Asia!

No matter how good the uniform or how fine the rifle, deep down they are still the old army that was utterly defeated by the Japanese in the First Sino-Japanese War.

Weapons can be upgraded and replaced, but the human brain cannot be replaced.

War is all about brains!