The Kuomintang had a "famous general" named Sun Yuanliang, whose nickname was very powerful, called "Flying General".
General Fei described him as having achieved light feats and running fast, from the Northern Expedition, the Battle of Songhu, the Battle of Nanjing, all the way to the Battle of Huaihai... No matter what, he could run away.
In the Northern Expedition in 1926, the commander of Sun Yuanliang fled.
In the Battle of Songhu in 1937, Sun Yuanliang's division commander escaped.
In the 1937 Defense of Nanjing, Commander Sun Yuanliang fled.
In the Battle of Huaihai in 1948, Commander Sun Yuanliang fled.
In the 1949 Liberation War, Sun Yuanliang followed the bald Jiang and fled.
He had a brilliant record in this life, either on the run, or on the way to escape.
In the defense of Nanjing, Sun Yuanliang's behavior was the worst, and Ge Tian's memoirs wrote:
After Sun Yuanliang arrived in Nanjing, he used his full-pay spirit to go to the Confucius Temple (this is a place he was familiar with, his little wife Yang Mou was originally a singer at the Confucius Temple) to listen to the drama and prostitutes, and rarely made preparations for the enemy at the division headquarters.
Yuhuatai was the defensive area of the 88th Division, but Sun Yuanliang had never gone to the position to inspect the fortifications, and once was urged by Chiang Kai-shek's telephone, ran to the position and turned around, and actually found that most of the military fortifications were locked and could not be opened, and many fortifications were found according to the map, but could not be found. How could such military commanders and fortifications be able to stop the Japanese army?
On the morning of December 12, 1937, the Japanese army broke through the Yuhuatai and attacked the Zhonghua Gate position. Officers and men of the 262nd Brigade of the 88th Division held the city walls despite Japanese artillery fire. At this time, Sun Yuanliang led the division's direct subordinate unit and the 262nd Brigade to retreat to Xiaguan without authorization, in an attempt to cross the river and retreat north. Inside the Rujiang Gate, he was "dissuaded" with machine guns by the supervision team of Song Xilian, the commander of the 36th Division, and had to return to zhonghua gate to continue fighting. At noon, the Zhonghua Gate was breached. Sun Yuanliang's true colors as "Flying General" reappeared, and without informing his subordinates, he only cared about running away on his own, and no one knew where he had hidden. In the "Diary of Rabe", we can see the evidence of the "Flying General" hiding in Nanjing: "For Sun Yuanliang, commander of the Kuomintang 72nd Army and commander of the 88th Division, Rabe is even more concerned. Knowing that Sun was hiding in a refugee camp, Rabe personally took him to live in the top room of the Jinling Women's Liberal Arts College..."
Song Xilian, commander of the Kuomintang 36th Division, even angrily rebuked in the "Personal Experience of the Battle of Nanjing":
On our part, the senior cadres who participated in the campaign to defend Nanjing are all responsible. In particular, sun yuanliang's despicable and shameful behavior (after Sun Yuanliang came out of the meeting at the commander's headquarters at 5 p.m. on the 12th, he did not return to the army, took off his military uniform, changed into plain clothes, ran to a brothel to worship his mother as a dry mother, moved to a refugee area to hide for 1 month, and then evacuated the refugees with the Japanese army before he was mixed out), which is even more unspeakable...
When Sun Yuanliang fled Nanjing, the saddest thing was that his property worth 500,000 yuan in Nanjing, after the August 13 Incident, the Japanese army invaded Shanghai, and General Sun Da was still building a villa in Nanjing...
On the day of the destruction of the city of Nanjing, the senior Kuomintang generals disappeared without a trace, and Chairman Jiang and his "famous generals", one after another, had no retreat plan and no evacuation measures... Leaving hundreds of thousands of unarmed soldiers and civilians, facing the butcher knives of the Japanese...
After the Battle of Nanjing, the people fleeing to Wuhan in the Nanjing area of Shanghai accused Sun Yuanliang of robbing cotton yarn books in Shanghai, robbing supplies from shops in Wuxi and other places in Suzhou, and raping representatives of Shanghai students; Liao Lingqi, commander of the 264th Brigade of the 88th Division, sent a telegram in the name of all officers and men to ask Chiang Kai-shek to shoot Sun Yuanliang, pointing out that he had withheld military salaries in peacetime, privately engraved seals to forge reimbursements, had always lived a life of hedonism and corruption, was greedy and afraid of death in wartime, and had not received orders to retreat during the War of Resistance in Nanjing. He left the division headquarters without authorization and fled to the legation, begging for imperialist protection, disregarding the danger to the lives of all the officers and men of the division, and so on... At that time, the crowd was in a fierce mood, and a number of generals telegraphed Chiang Kai-shek to shoot Sun Yuanliang.
Chiang Kai-shek was furious and ordered sun yuanliang to "strictly handle sun yuanliang" and ordered sun yuanliang to report to the military justice department himself.
But Sun Yuanliang was experienced, and he knew that Chiang Kai-shek would not really strictly deal with himself, so he wrote a "Sun Yuanliang's Experience of Fighting Guerrillas in Qixia Mountain", which Cao Juren published in the newspaper and portrayed himself as a heroic general who insisted on resisting the War. He gave Liao Lingqi another 50,000 yuan, found 2 wounded soldiers to testify against perjury, sent money to the military judge, and leveled the military justice department.
Finally, Miss Yang, who knew what had happened, miss Yang, who had been found from Nanjing, the florist in Nanjing's own family, and the guards all had their mouths shut, and the guards' 15-year-old son had come to look for relatives and had also been cut down and removed. Sun Yuanliang spent 200,000 yuan before and after to put things to rest. On May 11, 1938, the Department of Military Justice Executive Director issued a signature to his superiors, and after investigation, it was clear that Sun Yuanliang was "safe and innocent." It was only released after 42 days of imprisonment.
We can also see that Chiang Kai-shek has true love for this "flying general" and has all kinds of protections, even if he has abandoned his troops many times and run faster than rabbits; in the defense of Nanjing, he let the leaderless soldiers be slaughtered miserably, which is simply a historical sinner, but the chairman of the committee is still very fond of him, so it is a miracle that the Kuomintang government does not collapse.
It is a pity that such a person, such a shameless person, actually lived a long life, lived to the age of 103, died in 2007, and wrote an autobiographical book called "A Moment in a Billion Light-Years" - he has no culture and elegance, and uses the light-year as a unit of time.