Spy Wars: I am the Captain of the Military Police

Chapter 1066 Rules are rigid, but people are flexible!

"Hey, still pretending!" Terauchi Hisaichi slapped his thigh so hard that the bowls and plates on the table rattled.

He moved even closer, and Zhou Zhengqing could smell the scent of sake and tobacco mixed on him—a scent that had been cultivated over a long period of time, the scent of an old soldier.

"My North China Area Army has been fighting in Shanxi and Hebei for so long, and the Chinese military equipment we've captured is so plentiful that the warehouses are almost overflowing!" Terauchi Hisaichi counted on his fingers, one by one: "Zhongzheng rifles, Hanyang rifles, Czech light machine guns, Shanxi-made submachine guns, and even quite a few mortars and mountain guns!"

After the Battle of Taiyuan alone, the inventory of captured weapons revealed 30,000 usable rifles, over a thousand light and heavy machine guns, and more than two hundred artillery pieces of various calibers!

His voice grew lower and lower, but his speech became faster and faster: "What use are these things to the Imperial Army? The ammunition is not interchangeable, maintenance is troublesome, spare parts are hard to come by, and once they break, they're just a pile of scrap metal."

It's a waste to leave it rusting in the warehouse! Even if we send it back to China to be remelted, my North China Army won't gain any benefit.

"I was thinking, could we perhaps make an arrangement? You don't just have morphine; it's another resource my North China Army needs. We can discuss many other things produced in Manchukuo."

Terauchi Hisaichi did not utter the words "barter".

But everyone present understood.

Those four words, like an invisible ghost, lingered in the aroma of sake and the lingering warmth of the food, weighing heavily on everyone's heart.

The candlelight cast flickering shadows on the deeply lined face of the temple's head, making his expression appear even more profound and unfathomable.

They used captured Chinese military equipment, which had limited value to the Japanese army, to exchange for urgently needed medicines and logistical supplies at the front lines.

This is an extremely bold and dangerous proposal.

Once these weapons are leaked, who will eventually get them?

Was it the Shanxi Death Squad? Or the civilian anti-Japanese armed forces in Chahar and other parts of Hebei?

Or perhaps those local warlords and bandits who wavered on the edge of the occupied territories, willing to follow whoever offered them the most benefits?

It even eventually ended up in the hands of the Nanjing government... or should we now call it the hands of the Wuhan government's army?

Before the fall of Nanjing, the Nationalist government announced the relocation of its capital to Chongqing. However, its core military, diplomatic, and economic departments did not immediately move to Chongqing. Instead, they were temporarily concentrated in Wuhan, making Wuhan the de facto temporary command center of the Chinese government.

Zhou Zhengqing's heart skipped a beat.

Despite being mentally prepared, and despite knowing that Terauchi Hisaichi, a veteran warlord who had risen through the ranks since the Russo-Japanese War, was capable of any means for personal gain and would circumvent any rules to maintain his massive army, the fact that the other party proposed this plan so directly and so blatantly, even in front of the Imperial Family who he thought was about to take over as commander of the Central China Expeditionary Army, still surprised him.

This was not a small-scale, sporadic, clandestine transaction by junior officers for personal gain, but a systematic, large-scale arms smuggling operation backed by the North China Area Army Headquarters.

Once it unfolds on a massive scale, it will be enough to subtly alter the balance of power in local areas.

Zhou Zhengqing had no idea how Terauchi Hisaichi dared to say such things so openly. He knew that he and the Kwantung Army had already established a stable trade route for military supplies, but even the Kwantung Army Commander, Ueda Kenkichi, had never put things out in the open like Terauchi Hisaichi had.

Zhou Zhengqing could almost see those Zhongzheng rifles, which had been piled up in some dark warehouse in Taiyuan, Baoding, or Shijiazhuang, being polished, oiled, and fitted with bayonets again.

Every gun, every bullet, could one day in the future, fire from an unseen muzzle, pierce the khaki uniforms of the Japanese soldiers, and strike the chests of those young soldiers who may have been complaining about insufficient supplies just yesterday.

To some extent, the blame for those lost lives should also be placed on him, the "middleman."

Does Zhou Zhengqing care? Obviously not.

What about Terauchi Hisaichi?

In the eyes of this veteran, the needs of the soldiers on the front lines, the stability of supplies for the hundreds of thousands of troops in the North China Front Army, the morale of the troops, and the enormous benefits and resources that he and his faction could gain from these were far more important than the vague and potentially "aiding the enemy" risk.

War is a money-devouring beast, a bottomless pit of resource consumption.

Although the North China Area Army appeared to have occupied vast territories, resistance in the occupied areas never ceased. Maintaining the occupation required huge sums of money, while the General Headquarters' funding was always stretched thin. The competition for resources with the Kwantung Army and the Central China Area Army never stopped.

These "scrap metal" items, stored in the warehouse, are of no value to him or the army, but instead occupy valuable storage space, increasing management costs and the number of guards required.

If we could use these to trade for morphine, quinine, and sulfonamides urgently needed on the front lines, for food, cotton clothing, shoes, and socks to get through the winter, and for fuel for trucks, that would be real, tangible benefits that we could actually hold onto.

As for how many Japanese soldiers those weapons would kill? That was a tactical question for frontline commanders to consider, and a war risk for the soldiers to face.

In war, how can there be no deaths?

"General Terauchi," Zhou Zhengqing said after a few seconds of silence, "This... I'm afraid it's against the rules, isn't it? Armaments are military supplies, especially captured enemy equipment. Private transactions are no small matter."

Once it's leaked...

"Rules?" Terauchi Hisaichi chuckled, his laughter rough and full of disdain for formalities and mockery of Kyoto bureaucrats: "Rules are dead, but people are alive!"

Takuto, regarding your relationship with the Kwantung Army... Hehehe... Rules are for dealing with those who lack ability, connections, and influence!

Besides, do you think I don't know?

If I don't do it, those division commanders, brigade commanders, and regimental commanders will just obediently stay and live off those scrap metal.

Last month, the 20th Division secretly sold 500 Hanyang rifles and 20,000 rounds of ammunition to Donghua Trading Company to exchange for a batch of cotton-padded coats and leather boots for the troops to get through the winter!

The Yamamoto Regiment of the 108th Division traded six damaged, unrepairable Shanxi-made mountain guns with a merchant in Tianjin, supposedly with ties to the military police headquarters, for five tons of grain and two hundred catties of salt! And the 4th Brigade, they…

Terauchi Hisaichi knew it like the back of his hand, clearly pointing out the numbers, people, and quantities of each and every one of them.

This was both a demonstration of his control over his troops, showing that nothing could escape his notice, and a message to Zhou Zhengqing.

He had known about this for a long time and had tacitly approved it. It was a "self-rescue" behavior of the front-line troops under the rigid supply system, and it was an open secret.

He now simply wants to standardize and scale it up, and extract greater benefits for the army group headquarters from it.