When it comes to the Song Dynasty, people always associate him with two words: rich and weak. The rich are uncompromising, and there are hard state stats out there to back them up. But is it true that wen is weak? If separated, the text is true, after all, there is the brilliance of song words; but weak, is it not true? Judging from the battle record, it seems to be true that the Song generation has been suppressed by the nomads on the side. But is there really no bright spot? In fact, there are still many. Especially in the Southern Song Dynasty, led by Yue Fei, a large number of famous generals did emerge. The one we are going to introduce today is a typical one. He single-handedly helped the Southern Song Dynasty survive the difficulties of national annihilation. And his impact on the war even reached overseas, and he was mentioned in books published by the British hundreds of years later. This person was Li Bao, a person who had almost died in Yue Fei's military law.
Li Bao is a native of Hebei and was a heroic man in his early years. Later, the Jin army invaded, Jianyan crossed south, and Hebei fell to the enemy. When others chose to swallow their anger, Li Bao did not want to endure. He ran to Shandong and gathered the rebels, trying to stab jinjun in the back. But after all, his strength was too weak, and he was quickly defeated by the Jin Army. He had no choice but to take more than thirty brothers with him and defected from the sea to the Southern Song Dynasty.
Li Baolai's Southern Song Dynasty was not just to avoid disasters, he still wanted to restore the mountains and rivers. Therefore, after landing, he almost immediately went to vote for the Yue Family Army, which was the most famous at that time! After that, Li Bao's deeds became confusing, and when I saw him again, it was already decades later. And that was Li Bao's identity, the general of the water army. What happened in the middle of this time is now much to say. A more recognized statement is that Li Bao violated military law and broke away from the ranks of the Yue family's army.
The synopsis of the story goes like this. When Li Bao arrived at the Yue family army, he found that even if it was the Yue family army, he could not act rashly without the orders of the imperial court. At this time, Emperor Gaozong of Song conceived more about how to protect himself, so the task of the Yue family army was mainly to defend, to fight a dozen pseudo-Qi troops who had crossed the border. Moreover, the strict discipline of the Yue family army made li bao very uncomfortable for a person who had not been disciplined by the military. So after planning, Li Bao and the thirty or so good brothers decided to escape again and return to Zhanshan in Shandong as king.
However, the military discipline of the Yue family's army is like steel, how can a few small soldiers easily escape? Li Bao and the others were quickly arrested and punished according to the crime of escaping from the front, and prepared to behead them. Before his execution, Li Bao looked up at the sky and sighed: "I was bent on restoring the rivers and mountains, and I didn't expect to die at the hands of my own army!" Yue Fei was moved by compassion, so he exonerated him of the capital crime and asked him to return to Shandong to continue organizing the rebel army. Later, Yue Fei went on a northern expedition, and Li Bao attacked behind enemy lines, which was very effective. However, yue fei was later framed and wrongfully killed, and Li Bao lost foreign aid and could only return to the Song Dynasty. Since then, this hot-blooded warrior has been hidden by the snow.
The story is probably fake, but one thing is certain, Li Bao has not forgotten the war when he has not received the order to send troops. He combined the latest technology of the Song Dynasty to create a secret weapon. In a future naval battle, this weapon will play an important role and directly change the nature of that naval battle.
In the ninth year of the reign of the Jin Emperor (1149 AD), the Right Chancellor and Marshal of the Jin Dynasty killed Emperor Xizong of Jin and established himself as emperor. He had an ideal, that is, "the handsome master cuts far away, and insists on his ruler and asks the guilt first." It goes without saying that as a complete Yan Liang, his so-called "far" refers to the Southern Song Dynasty, and "Junchang" naturally refers to Song Gaozong. For this ideal, he vigorously developed the water army and built warships, and the action was very large.
In 1161 AD, Yan Liang felt that he was ready to stop, so he issued an order to march into the Southern Song Dynasty in four ways! One of the roads was a water army led by Su Baoheng and Yan Zhengjianu. Their mission was to attack Zhejiang and then march up the Qiantang River to capture Lin'an, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. At this time, Emperor Gaozong of Song remembered Li Bao, who had been shelved for a long time, and immediately made him the deputy commander of the Horse Infantry Army of Zhejiang West Road, commanding the water army to fight with Su Baoheng. Before leaving, Emperor Gaozong of Song asked Li Bao how many ships and soldiers he needed. Li Bao said: "One hundred and twenty strong ships are enough; soldiers, only three thousand crossbowmen are enough." Things are urgent, flag armaments and other general preparations are ok. Emperor Gaozong of Song then gave Li Bao clothes and jade belts, as well as imperial horses, as well as Shangfang's sword and bow and arrow, plus a large sum of money.
After Li Bao set out, he first sent his son Gongzuo to inquire about the enemy. Unexpectedly, Gong Zuo overtook the task and not only received information on the average level of the enemy's water army, but also recaptured Haizhou (海州, in modern Lianyungang, Jiangsu) together with the famous general Wei Sheng. The morale of the Song army was greatly boosted, and they went out to sea by the fierce wind. When we arrived outside Haizhou City, we found that the enemy had also arrived, and the ships stretched like clouds for tens of miles. A part of the sailors disembarked and were attacking Haizhou City.
Li Bao was not intimidated, and he decided to first clear the outskirts of Haizhou and take infantry warfare as the precursor of the battle. He climbed to the shore, tapped the ground with the sword in his hand, and said, "This is our own land, whether it is a desperate battle, everyone will watch and do it for themselves." Then he engaged the enemy infantry with a horse' mallet. The Song soldiers were inspired by him, fought desperately, and really drove the enemy back to the ship. Seeing that the city defenses of Haizhou had been consolidated and that there was no point in fighting any longer, the Jin army sailed back to Tangdao (near present-day Qingdao).
After learning this, Li Bao immediately led his army to set out, wanting to launch a war of annihilation unexpectedly with a small and broad. When the Jin army heard the war drums of the Song army, they were shocked and quickly pulled up the sails. But I didn't expect that there were too many ships on my side, and they were crowded together for a while, and they were chaotic.
Suddenly, Li Bao's fleet rushed to the front. With a single order, the Song Army's guided rockets shot out like flying locusts, instantly giving the other side a burning camp! The sails of the Golden Army are all made of tarpaulin, and now it is just made of fuel!
However, after all, there were too many warships of the Golden Army, and although Li Bao burned some of them, there were still many unharmed. After a brief period of confusion, they began to reorganize and launch a counterattack against Li Bao's fleet. They still had an advantage over Li Bao's water force.
When the enemy ship approached only a few tens of steps away, Li Bao gave an order, and the Song Army's warship stretched out copper pipes one after another, spewing out fiery tongues of fire inside! And this kind of fire is on the spot, and it can't be extinguished, not even with water! Li Bao's most recent warships instantly turned into fireballs, reduced to ashes in the wailing of the soldiers.
Li Bao's new weapon is the famous "fierce fire oil tank". In terms of shape, the fierce fire oil cabinet is a box made of cooked copper with something similar to today's syringe on it, with a piston on the back and a nozzle in the front. And in that cooked copper box, it will probably be filled with about 1.5 kilograms of fire oil. Each time it is used, the operator first pushes the piston to spray the fire oil, and at the same time, a red-hot iron cone is used as a primer to ignite the fire oil. In this way, the effect of today's flamethrower can be formed. And because the chemical composition in the fire oil is complex, it cannot be extinguished in a conventional way, and once all this fire is burned, there is almost no way to extinguish it. This also shows that the fierce fire oil tank is particularly powerful.
In fact, this kind of weapon was not the first of Li Bao. As early as the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, Wu Yueguo used this kind of thing; in the early years of the Song Dynasty, the general Cao Bin attacked the Southern Tang Dynasty, and also used similar things. However, Li Bao improved the "fierce fire oil tank" to make it lighter in weight, longer in range, and more suitable for naval warfare.
As soon as the new weapons came out, the Jin soldiers' sailors could imagine that many people jumped into the water and drowned in order to avoid the fire; the Central Plains people responsible for driving the ship directly chose to surrender; the deputy commander of the Jin army, Yan Zhengjianu, along with the other five generals, was beheaded; and the huge warships of the Jin army slowly disappeared in a firelight.
The significance of this naval battle is not only to preserve a Southern Song Dynasty, but also to set a precedent for the large-scale use of thermal weapons in the history of the world's navies. Later, in the British publication of "100 Most Significant Battles Affecting Mankind", the Battle of Tang Island was on the list. Li Bao inadvertently became a world-class celebrity.