The Japanese were well armed, their artillery fire was very strong, and they occupied favorable terrain to effectively kill and wound the attacking forces. The Ninety-Four-Hundred Regiment suffered a loss in the absence of heavy artillery, and many officers and men, including a battalion commander, were shot and killed in front of the enemy position.
However, the morale of the Cantonese army was also very strong. In order to cover the charge of the troops, Chen Jianfu, commander of the machine gun company, personally acted as a machine gun shooter, carrying a machine gun to carry out a fierce strafing of the Japanese army until he was martyred. After Chen Jianfu died in battle, a squad leader ran over and picked up a machine gun and said, "I want to avenge the company commander." As soon as the voice dropped, he was also shot and killed. Since then, all the machine gunners have suffered the same fate, but none of them have flinched, and in the end, only one person in the machine gun squad has survived.
After a night of fierce fighting, only a hundred men remained of the two battalions of the 940 Regiment to the front line, and about three-quarters of the soldiers were lost. The losses were so great that they had never been seen since the establishment of the 940s Regiment, and the task of recovering the Bolong Pass had not yet been completed. Li Youzhuang burst into tears and blamed himself. After returning to the camp, he was unable to sleep and eat, and after thinking about it repeatedly, he personally drafted a telegram to the commander of the military division, so that he had no direction for command, and pleaded for severe punishment.
Due to the failure to repel the enemy troops at Yinzhan Pass and Bolong Pass, and the heavy casualties of their own, Li Youzhuang's Sixty-second Army had been ordered by Yu Hanmou to enter Fogang from the railway side to assemble and rest. When the military commander Huang Tao summoned Li Youzhuang, he not only did not punish him, but also comforted him: "The great battle is coming, so we must make good preparations." Are you sure that your regiment will fight again? ”
Li Youzhuang was very excited, and said on the spot: "Although our regiment has fallen a lot, everyone has an ambition to take revenge and hatred, and the military commander can safely put my regiment in any difficult place!" ”
At this time, the entire war situation in northern Guangdong had undergone major changes. Finding that the main force of the Cantonese army was attracted to the railway line, Ando immediately mobilized the Guards Mixed Brigade, the Eighteenth Division and the Thirty-eighth Division to launch an offensive along the road line against the Chinese defensive positions. The situation in all directions was extremely fierce, the Cantonese army fought bravely, and officers and men could often hear such blood-curdling words as "as long as we have a breath, we must also hold our positions and fight with the Japanese ghosts to the end" and "a few big ones, rush up", but because the Japanese army is too strong, and at the same time, some divisions and commanders have the problem of fear of the enemy or mistakes in decision-making, and the entire defense line is still difficult to maintain.
The Niubei Ridge of the Middle Road is continuous and overlapping, and has always been a military pass, until modern times, there is still a village called Junying Village in the town (from the name, it is known that the army used to be stationed in Tun). After the fall of Guangzhou, After Yu Hanmou led the Cantonese army to retreat to the northern Guangdong defensive line, he designated the oxback ridge as the main position, and the 186th Division was responsible for holding it. Such a dangerous place could be used to fight the enemy for at least two or three rounds, but the 186th Division lacked the courage to make contact with the superior enemy and flee north.
At that time, telephone line networks were set up in the deep areas of the northern Guangdong positions, and many relay stations guarded by signal troops were set up. Even if the 186th Division did not have communication tools, it could also go to the relay office to make calls, but the commander of the division was so flustered that he refused to even do this, and afterwards he was ridiculed by the Guangdong army as timid as a rat and lost the unity of the army.
In the Battle of Northern Guangdong (3), to be continued...