War of Resistance: From a Routed Soldier to an Iron Torrent

The day he transmigrated, Lin Yuanzheng thought he had fallen into the war game he designed. The artillery fire was real, and so were the corpses. He had transmigrated into the body of a Northeast Army battalion commander, right in the midst of the bloodiest days of the Battle of Shanghai.

The one thing that set him apart was his ability to sense the battlefield whenever he closed his eyes: where the Japanese troops were, whether the flanks were under ambush. It was like a beast catching the scent of danger. But war wasn’t a game. There was no respawn button. He led just over thirty stragglers out of a mountain of corpses, rallied scattered soldiers, and formed an “Independent Detachment” that didn’t even have enough rifles to go around.

From Shanghai to Nanjing, from Jiangyin to Huaihai, one modern man spent twelve years traversing the most agonizing and heroic chapter in China’s history. When he finally stood before Tiananmen in 1949, he at last understood the meaning of those words:

This war wasn’t fought for oneself.