Wu Sangui was one of the most famous warlords of the late Qing and early Ming dynasties, the Ming commander-in-chief, who commanded the last field troops of the empire to surrender to the Manchu Qing, and finally became the king of Pingxi and claimed the title of emperor.
So, how much strength did Wu Sangui have when he surrendered to the Manchu Qing at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and he was able to take the lead for the Qing Dynasty to sweep through the Central Plains, unify the world, and force the Yongli Emperor to die, is it really because his GuanNing army is extremely powerful?
Today we will talk about the strength of Wu Sangui in the Shanhaiguan period at the end of the Ming Dynasty.
Shanhaiguan was a military town of the Ming Dynasty, which was the throat connecting the northeast and Beijing, and Shanhaiguan could avoid the direct threat of the Eight Banners Army to Beijing in the hands of the Ming Dynasty, and once Shanhaiguan fell, it meant that the enemy in the northeast could attack the city of Beijing in a few days.
Therefore, from the beginning of the rise of the Manchu Qing, the Ming Dynasty carried out large-scale reinforcement of Shanhaiguan, typical of Wang Zaijin and others, which built Shanhaiguan into a military system, impregnable.
On the other hand, the Ming Dynasty deployed a large number of elite border troops from Shanhaiguan to Ningyuan and other places in Jinzhou, Guanwai, which is the so-called "Guanning Army", which is also known as the "Guanning Iron Horse" by some people.
First of all, we must understand that the Guanning Army is only one of the Ming Dynasty border troops, and its combat effectiveness is not much stronger than that of the Qin Army and the Tianxiong Army, but since they are the people of Liaodi, they naturally have the responsibility and motivation to defend their homeland and defend the country, so they have become the main force against the Eight Banner Army.
But in fact, in the more than ten years of combat against the Eight Banner Army, the Guanning Army lost more than one victory, and in the end it did not even dare to fight a field battle, and it could not defend the city, pit many guest troops from other places to support, and lost countless cities, money, food, and ordnance.
To put it bluntly, the Guan Ning Army has always been a defeated general of the Eight Banner Army, losing eight or nine times in ten battles, and can only win once or twice with artillery or small-scale battles.
Because the Guanning Army, like all the border armies at the end of the Ming Dynasty, had become warlordized, the Liaotu generals had become addicted to drinking the blood of soldiers and eating empty pay, and several governors could not control them, so the Guanning Army, which had a strong army on the book, did not have good actual combat effectiveness.
But it was such an army that was already the most elite unit at the end of the Ming Dynasty, "the lame general who pulled out inside".
Wu Sangui, as a Liaodi general, was a representative figure of the Liaodi military clique of the Ming Dynasty. At the end of the Chongzhen Period, as the generals withered and scattered, Wu Sangui gradually emerged and became a new generation of Liaodi interest groups.
In the Thirteenth Year Battle of Songjin in Chongzhen, the Ming Dynasty's "Eight General Soldiers and ThirteenTh Army" was almost completely destroyed, and only Wu Sangui and others led less than 30,000 remnants of soldiers to return to Shanhaiguan. This group of people was the main force that Wu Sangui later mastered, and it was also the last bloodline of the Ming Dynasty border army.
In the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng broke through Beijing, chongzhen emperor Zhu Youjian committed suicide, Wu Sangui plus the soldiers and horses of Gao Di, the chief soldier of Shanhaiguan, a total of 50,000 people, of which 30,000 were xiangyong. In other words, Wu Sangui's standing army in his hands before the decisive battle of a piece of stone was only about 20,000 people, which was the real strength of Wu Sangui at that time.
In the Battle of Yishi, Li Zicheng attacked Wu Sangui with 60,000 or 70,000 rebel troops, and in two days he crushed it, and the northern wing of Shanhaiguan directly surrendered.
Wu Sangui was cornered, so he had to shave his hair and change his clothes, surrendered to the Manchu Qing, and defeated the rebel army with the help of the Eight Banner Army.
Subsequently, Dolgun ordered Wu Sangui's GuanNing Army as a guide to lead the Eight Banners Army south to the Central Plains, opening the road to the Manchu Qing unification of China.
Wu Sangui's Guanning army fought outside the crotch, but treated his compatriots fiercely, and on the way south, the Qing army plundered and massacred several times, all of which were the figures of Wu Sangui's troops.
During the Ming Dynasty, when the warlords avoided war and defended the country, and when they acted as eagle dogs of the Qing court and plundered their compatriots to make a fortune, they scrambled to burst out a much stronger fighting force than in those years. In the eyes of these warlords and their private armed forces, there is no national interest, only personal interest.