During the Liberation War, the 74th Division, as the head of the five main forces of the Kuomintang, successively experienced four military commanders, Yu Jishi, Wang Yaowu, Shi Zhongcheng, and Zhang Lingfu, and the least famous of these four commanders was the third military commander, Shi Zhongcheng.
Shi Zhongcheng was a native of Tongcheng, Anhui Province, who had defected to the Feng clan warlord Zhang Zongchang in his early years, and Zhang Zongchang's most criticized place was that he changed the court many times.
When Zhang Zongchang was in Shandong, he squeezed the people in Jinan and Qingdao to support his luxurious life, personally set up more than 50 kinds of tax lines, and not only that, but also suppressed the workers' movement by force, resulting in a series of tragic cases.
In 1928, Zhang Zongchang was still unwilling after the defeat of the army, he secretly ran to Japan to collude with the Japanese army and became an enemy of the people, and Shi Zhongcheng's reputation was also dragged down by such a leader.
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Shi Zhongcheng was stationed in Guangxi after accepting the reorganization of the Nanjing government, where he led his subordinates to fight the Japanese army for a month, and in the battle he adhered to the original intention of the strategy of "not dying, not retreating, not fleeing", stubbornly resisting the Japanese army and defeating the Japanese army many times.
Shi Zhongcheng played the integrity of a Chinese soldier in this battle, and although his status could not be compared with that of the generals of the Kuomintang camp, it did not affect Shi Zhongcheng's excellent record at all.
When the rest of the Kuomintang army was at a disadvantage under the frenzied attack of the Japanese army, Shi Zhongcheng and his subordinates performed remarkably well on the frontal battlefield, and later Shi Zhongcheng was commended by Chiang Kai-shek for his outstanding military achievements, and Chiang Kai-shek promoted him to the commander of the 57th Division.
After the Battle of Songhu, the Chinese soldiers and the Japanese army began the Battle of Wuhan again, and Shi Zhongcheng rushed to the front line before he could fully reorganize his troops.
On September 14, 1938, he led his subordinates to engage the Japanese at Tianjia Town, when the Chinese army was mainly the 57th Division and the 9th Division, and the Japanese army was the elite Sixth Division regiment known as the "First in Kyushu".
This vicious battle lasted for more than half a month, and Shi Zhongcheng's unit was at a disadvantage on the battlefield because of the problems of lack of soldiers and short generals and relatively backward weapons and equipment.
After the war had been going on for a while, the situation in the 57th Division was no longer optimistic, with 6 casualties among cadres at or above the regimental level in the unit, and the casualties of lower-level officers were even more serious, and the number of casualties among soldiers was more than half.
Even so, the soldiers of the 57th Division were still out of the line of fire, and the division commander Shi Zhongcheng, who was seriously wounded at this time, personally took up his gun and led the soldiers to launch a suicide charge with the Japanese army.
In the face of the crazy attack of the 57th Division, the Japanese army, which has always felt good about itself, was also frightened, and a Japanese officer once said: "This is the only Chinese unit on the Chinese battlefield that can defeat the Japanese army. ”
At the beginning of 1939, the fame of Shi Zhongcheng's 57th Division spread throughout Guangxi, Hubei, Hunan and other places, and this unit was later incorporated into the elite 74th Division of the Huangpu Family, which was like a tiger adding wings to the 74th Division, and the 74th Division gradually became the first anti-Japanese Iron Army and the first of the five ace main forces.
In 1944, Wang Yaowu made great achievements in the anti-Japanese resistance in Songhu, Nanjing, Lanfeng, Zhejiang and other places in Shanghai, and was promoted to commander-in-chief of the group army, after which he named Shi Zhongcheng to succeed him as the commander of the 74th Division among Li Tianxia, Zhang Lingfu and others, and none of the soldiers in the whole army objected, after all, Shi Zhongcheng's strength was there.
At the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1945, Shi Zhongcheng was ordered to lead his troops to garrison Nanjing, because his 74th Army was the only ace unit of the Concubine clan that was approved to garrison Nanjing, so it was named "Yulin Army".
During the Liberation War, Shi Zhongcheng hated to fight a civil war, so he resigned and returned to his hometown of Tongcheng, Anhui Province, on the pretext of being unwell, to recuperate, and Chiang Kai-shek put Zhang Lingfu in charge of the 74th Army, and the 74th Army was reorganized and restructured from then on.
In 1947, when the enemy and we were engaged in battle at Menglianggu, General Su Yu used tactics to surround the 74th Army, resulting in the total annihilation of this ace unit of the Kuomintang and the death of its commander Zhang Lingfu.
After Zhang Lingfu's death, Qiu Weida and Lao Guanying re-formed the 74th Army, but the combat effectiveness of the army was much worse than before, and it had long lost the glory of the ace iron army and the world's first.
On the eve of the liberation of Nanjing in 1949, Shi Zhongcheng and his family fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek, but because they were not from a concubine background, they were always suppressed by their superiors and colleagues, and were gradually squeezed out of the center of power.
Shi Zhongcheng's life in his later years was not good, he was poor and poor, he could only rely on raising chickens to survive, and it was really regrettable that a generation of famous generals had ended up like this.
In 1974, 77-year-old Shi Zhongcheng died of illness, Shi Zhongcheng is a person with national righteousness, although he relied on his military achievements to get ahead, but never did some wrong things in order to obtain military achievements, if he did not stand in the wrong team, he will definitely get better treatment.