Li Zicheng, a native of Mizhi County, Shaanxi, born in 1606 and died in 1645, was the leader of the peasant rebel army at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the founder of the Great Shun Dynasty, and a key figure who influenced the direction of history in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Many people have the impression that the Qing Dynasty destroyed the Ming Dynasty, in fact, the Qing Dynasty at that time really did not have that kind of strength, fought with the Ming Dynasty for more than twenty years, and has been firmly blocked outside the Shanhaiguan, Li Zicheng is the tomb digger of the Ming Dynasty.
Li Zicheng was born in a poor peasant family in northern Shaanxi, worked as a pawn when he was young, and also served as a major soldier for several days under Yang Zhaoji, the commander-in-chief of Ganzhou in the Ming Dynasty. In the second year of Chongzhen (1629), Li Zicheng's troops mutinied, and the soldiers who were hungry and cold did not receive military salaries for a long time, and they could not bear it, killed the general Wang Guoyong, and defected to the ranks of the peasant rebel army, and Li Zicheng began his career of rebellion.
Although Li Zicheng was born as an ordinary peasant, he was bold, righteous and bold, and did not fear death when he fought, and he also had outstanding military acumen, and soon stood out among the peasant army. He first served as the eighth team "general" under the first king Gao Yingxiang, and after Gao Yingxiang's sacrifice, Li Zicheng was supported by everyone as the second king of Chuang. His ranks also grew rapidly, becoming the strongest of the many rebel armies of the late Ming Dynasty.
The Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming Dynasty regarded Li Zi as a beast of flood and the number one strong enemy, and successively sent a number of famous generals such as Yang Sichang, Hong Chengzuo, Cao Wenzhao, Fu Zonglong, and Wang Qiaonian to surround and suppress Li Zicheng. However, Li Zicheng is proficient in the way of using soldiers, he adopts extremely flexible movement warfare and guerrilla warfare, is good at avoiding the real and attacking the virtual, and the sound of the east strikes the west, and the mysterious is unpredictable. And Li Zicheng also had a fierce cavalry under his command, known as the "old battalion soldiers", most of them were elite soldiers who had experienced hundreds of battles and had come from the rain of arrows on the sword mountain, and their combat effectiveness was extremely strong, and the ordinary Ming army was not their opponent at all.
Li Zicheng's team also became stronger and stronger, and the more refined they fought, which made Chongzhen have a headache and regarded it as a serious problem that endangered the survival of the Ming Dynasty. In the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, the Chongzhen Emperor appointed Sun Chuanting as the governor of Shaanxi on the three sides, with full responsibility for the conquest of Li Zicheng. Sun Chuanting was a famous general in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, who had been traversing the battlefield for decades, and was skilled in using soldiers, and was one of the best generals in the Ming Dynasty at that time.
After Sun Chuanting took office, he did not rush to attack, but judged the hour and sized up the situation, studied Li Zicheng's combat characteristics, and wanted to develop a set of targeted strategies for breaking the enemy. Considering that conventional tactics and weapons, it was difficult to restrain Li Zicheng, so he immersed himself in studying ancient military books and tried to find a way out of them. I didn't expect to be found by him.
As early as the end of the Three Kingdoms period, a unique weapon appeared: the side van. At that time, there was a military general Ma Long, in order to deal with the invincible Xianbei cavalry, once "made a partial carriage" and developed a wooden chariot. This side van is equipped with a thick wooden deck with arrow windows on the sides. With manpower propulsion, it can be used as a logistics vehicle to transport heavy weights in peacetime, can act as an "armored vehicle" to charge the front when attacking, can act as a defensive barrier when retreating, and can be connected end to end as a wall when encamped, which effectively increases the soldiers' protective ability and ability to resist cavalry, so that the army's combat efficiency is greatly improved.
As soon as Sun Chuanting made a clever move, he used the drawings in the history books as design drawings to make a large number of side vans, and more than 20,000 cars were manufactured before and after. In order to make this old antique weapon of the Three Kingdoms era more deterrent, Sun Chuanting also purchased a batch of fire bolts and Flang cannons and installed them on the side carriage. Because of the combination of firearms and partial vans, this improved chariot was also called "train" at that time, and Sun Chuanting specially set up a car battalion for the conquest of the rebels, which was regarded as the treasure of the Ming Dynasty.
In the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, Sun Chuanting led a large army out of Tongguan in the east, killed Ruzhou, Henan, and looked for Li Zicheng's main force to fight a decisive battle. The Ming army's car battalion showed great power in actual combat. On the battlefield, the Ming Dynasty's thousands of two chariots swept up all over the earth, the Ming army relied on the chariot to shoot arrows outward, Li Zicheng's rebel army was extremely uncomfortable in the face of such chariots, the charge could not move, the archery could not be fired, successive defeats and retreats, all the way to the retreat, "Ming Ji Beiluo" recorded, "one-third of the dead of the people's army", so that Li Zicheng suffered an unprecedented heavy setback.
Sun Chuanting marched forward with great vigor and momentum, successively conquering Ruzhou, Baofeng, and Wuxian, which Li Zicheng was defending, and was unstoppable. Seeing that li Zicheng was about to be forced to a dead end, the Ming Dynasty dropped the chain again at the critical moment. At the turn of summer and autumn, it rained heavily for several days in a row, the roads were muddy, the main force of the Ming army was going deep alone, the logistics of grain and grass supply were not available, and the Ming army ran out of grain.
The soldiers had no food to rebel against themselves, so Sun Chuanting had to be forced to withdraw his troops and wanted to return to Shaanxi for grain. The Ming generals were hungry and ran back in a daze. Li Zicheng keenly seized the fighter plane and launched a full-line onslaught on Sun Chuanting. At this time, the Ming army was hungry and cold, the soldiers had no fighting spirit, and under the impact of Li Zicheng, the entire line collapsed, and Sun Chuanting's car camp was destroyed and withdrew from the stage of history forever.
Reference materials: "Kitasoku of the Mingki"