I have yet to encounter any officer here who has read an account of the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese armies went up through Korea, crossed the Yalu River and turned westward to capture Port Arthur. The Japanese forces found out what cold weather would do to the troops under field conditions.

Unfortunately, the Manchurian crisis arose at a time when those nations who might have been expected to have perceived most clearly the necessity of preventing aggression were themselves in a condition of great internal difficulties owing to the financial crisis of those days. … And perhaps it was inevitable in such circumstances that our people should take little interest in any foreign questions. It was partly for these reasons, no doubt, that the conquest of Manchuria and the other northern provinces of China came to be consummated, and all the ambitious statesmen of the world were given an object lesson of how, in spite of the League and in spite of the Covenant, the old military policies could be successfully carried out. And may I venture to emphasize at this point a lesson which must never be forgotten: how much one problem in international affairs affects the whole conduct of those affairs. It was no doubt the failure of the League to check aggression in the Far East which first struck a blow at the whole system which we were trying to establish and which facilitated even greater attacks on international security.

As the rising sun melts thinly frozen ice, so the Japanese Army is overcoming Chinese troops.

There's been historical conflict between China and Russia for well over 1,000 years. … People forget that the Mongols came all the way to the Baltic Sea and all the way to where St. Petersburg is today … And the Russians have a good sense of history and they remember that.

In more than one century from the Opium War in 1840 to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, imperialist powers, on several occasions, invaded China or turned it into their own battleground, nibbling away and seizing millions of square kilometers of Chinese territory.

On July 7, 1937, Japan launched an all-out war on China. Through the first four and one-half years of total aggression, China defended herself unaided and alone. Not until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, in December of 1941.. .did the U.S. and China become allies. The combined effort of our two countries laid a solid foundation for the final victory in 1945. In those years of blood and tears, let us remember the moral courage of the people of the United States and China fighting shoulder to shoulder.

The battle of Moscow was the first major German defeat on land during the Second World War. It marked the end of the Blitzkrieg technique which had won Hitler and his Wehrmacht such spectacular victories. ... It was in Russia that the first fatal decisions were taken. From the political point of view, perhaps the most fatal of all had been the decision to attack that country in the first place. ... Many of our leaders had grossly underestimated the new enemy. This was partly due to ignorance. ... Several of our responsible senior officers had never campaigned in the East, having spent the whole of the First World War on the Western Front, and had no idea of the difficulties presented by the terrain nor of the toughness of the Russian fighting man. They chose to ignore the warnings of the experts.

It is also well-known that in the new map of China other border territories like Nepal, Sikkim, etc., figure. This gives us an idea of the aggressive designs of China. Let us see what the Chinese themselves did in the Korean War. As soon as the U.N. troops, or more correctly the American troops, reached the borders of China, it felt insecure and it immediately joined the Korean War. I do not say that because China conquered Tibet, we should have gone to war with it,... But this does not mean that we should recognize the claim of China on Tibet. We must know that it is an act of aggression against a foreign nation.

Well, as you look back with the hindsight of thirty years, I think that a farsighted statesman could have seen that this little sliver of land, the Korean peninsula, off the great Asian land mass, was of great strategic importance. It had been fought over already by Russia, China, Japan, and the Korean forces. And given the known conduct of the leadership of the Soviet Union, it was clear that an attempt might be made to regain control. The Russian forces had been in there up to 1904 and 1905 when the Russo-Japanese War took place. It's a very strategic little area there. It would become a threat to Japan by whichever great power controlled it. So I would say again that I would think that farsighted statesmen should have seen this thing coming and had they seen it then they would have been inclined to reverse the policy of only lightly arming the South Korean forces, but they didn't.

My plan proposed to throw a small but well-equipped air force into China. Japan, like England, floated her lifeblood on the sea and could be defeated more easily by slashing her salty arteries then by stabbing for her heart. ... The first phase of these operations entailed pounding the airfields, ports, staging areas, and shipping lanes where the Japanese were accumulating their military strength in Formosa, Hainan Island, Canton, and Indo-China. ... The second phase was to be directed against the Japanese home islands, to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu.

The Manchurian incident was the direct result of the London Conference negotiated by the Labour Government in 1930 under which the pacifist MacDonald and the almost wholly ignorant Henderson agreed to scrap five more battleships on behalf of Britain, induced American to scrap three, but failed to persuade the Japanese to scrap more than one. This agreement, which was hailed as a triumph for disarmament, was in reality the cause of the break-up of peace in the Far East, and the partial cause of our weakness against Italy in 1936. The responsibility for this lies with the Labour leaders and the party which supported them.

Progress and the slow pace of progress are two characteristics of the present situation, and the second ill accords with the urgent needs of the war, which is a source of great concern to patriots. But we are in the midst of a revolutionary war, and revolutionary war is an antitoxin which not only eliminates the enemy's poison but also purges us of our own filth. Every just, revolutionary war is endowed with tremendous power, which can transform many things or clear the way for their transformation. The Sino-Japanese war will transform both China and Japan; provided China perseveres in the War of Resistance and in the united front, the old Japan will surely be transformed into a new Japan and the old China into a new China, and people and everything else in both China and Japan will be transformed during and after the war. It is proper for us to regard the anti-Japanese war and our national reconstruction as interconnected. To say that Japan can also be transformed is to say that the war of aggression by her rulers will end in defeat and may lead to a revolution by the Japanese people. The day of triumph of the Japanese people's revolution will be the day Japan is transformed. All this is closely linked with China's War of Resistance and is a prospect we should take into account.

Japan will oppose any attempt at international control of Manchuria. It does not mean that we defy you, because Manchuria belongs to us by right. Read your history. We recovered Manchuria from Russia. We made it what it is today.

The then-Japanese empire suppressed the people of the Republic of China and took over the authority against our will, and so ‘Japanese occupation’ should be a proper term to describe the period.