Eight Flags Battle Map
For a long time, we did not give the Eight Flags soldiers enough respect and understanding.
When it comes to the Eight Flags soldiers, the first thing that everyone thinks of is "lifting caged birds", that is, "vulnerable".
It is true that at the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were indeed many Eight Banners army that decayed and degenerated; there were indeed many phenomena of not being able to pull off the bow and riding horses, especially the Eight Banners stationed in Beijing, which was even more obvious.
However, these Eight Banner soldiers who could not open their bows and could not ride horses were only part of the Eight Banners Army, and judging from the entire Qing Dynasty's external conquests, the Eight Banners Army, especially the Heilongjiang and Jilin Eight Banners Horse Brigade, was definitely the "sharp arrow" for charging and breaking the enemy.
Some people say that the Heilongjiang and Jilin Eight Flags Horse Teams that charged into the battlefield were mainly composed of Solun people, and could not be counted as eight banners.
However, the Eight Banners were originally a military organization, and the Solun people and dahur people in Heilongjiang were originally incorporated into the Eight Banners, so why weren't they the Eight Banners?
In fact, the Eight Banners Army of the Qing Dynasty was an army of about 200,000 people, and the performance and combat effectiveness of the Eight Banners could not be discussed in general.
In general, the combat effectiveness of the Eight Flags Army in Guannei is not as good as that of the Eight Banners Horse Team outside Guanwai, and the combat effectiveness of the Eight Banners Army outside Guanwai is inferior to that of Soren and the Dahur people.
Eight Flags Soldier
As early as the San Francisco Rebellion, the Kangxi Emperor found that the combat effectiveness of the Eight Banners in Guannei had dropped too much, and Wu Sangui was afraid of the soldiers of heilongjiang and the eight banners of Jilin.
From the beginning of the Yongzheng Dynasty, the Qing government deliberately used the Eight Banners of Guanwai soldiers as "sharp arrows", and it can be said that every time a foreign war is fought, it is indispensable to draw the Eight Banners of Guanwai.
Especially in the Qianlong Dynasty, because the Qianlong Emperor actively explored the outside world, we can see in the "Records of Emperor Gaozong of the Qing Dynasty" that the Qing Dynasty frequently transferred the Eight Banners of Guanwai, not only the Solun and Dahur people, but also the Manchus.
At the same time, the soldiers of the Eight Banners of Heilongjiang and Jilin (including Solun and Dahur) also suffered heavy casualties due to frequent draws.
When the 1,000 Heilongjiang Eight Banners Buthasolon and Dahur soldiers drawn by the Kangxi Dynasty in the 54th and 57th years of the Yangtze River withdrew in the fourth year of Yongzheng, according to statistics, only 660 pairs of armor were brought back, 340 pairs were missing, and only 331 waist knives were missing, and 669 were missing.
There are still so many losses of weapons and equipment, and the tragic casualties of their personnel are self-evident.
Why count weapons?
This is because although the Eight Banners of Guanwai do not need to prepare their own weapons, they can use the weapons provided by the imperial court, but these weapons are state-owned and must be handed over after the battle.
Even if there is unprovoked loss, it will be compensated.
In December of the 20th year of Qianlong, after the officers and men stationed in Solun and Dahur in Heilongjiang Zhucheng withdrew from the North Road barracks to their hometowns, they reported a total loss of 1,614 pairs of armor, 1,082 bows, 1,006 sets of bags, 1,480 waist knives, and 94,750 plum needles and arrows. At that time, the huge expenditure of the Ministry of Works on the replacement of these instruments was to deduct compensation with the soldiers' money and grain of two or two per month.
Huang Weihan wrote in the "Chronicle of Hulan Province and Wu ShiLuo": "Jiang Province rode and shot the world, and there were things in the Central Plains, and they competed to rely on each other. The Battle of Huibu, the Battle of Junbu, the Battle of Burma, the Battle of Jinchuan, the Battle of Chuanchu Sect Bandits, the Battle of Fa twist, and the officers and men stationed in Hulan were all in the line. ”
Especially in the Qianlong Dynasty's conquest of Dzungar and the battles of Pingding and Zhuo, the drawing of the Eight Banners of Heilongjiang and Jilin was simply devastating.
According to the statistics of the Heilongjiang general Qiuleduo, among the officers and men of Solun and Dahur who participated in the Battle of Pingding and Returning to Hulunbuir and Butha, there were 26 cases of father, son, brother and brother who went out on the expedition and all of them died, and 27 cases of two people who died. For example, the three brothers of Hulunbuir with the red flag Solun Phi Phi Taljicha, Mai Seletu and Songgaretu were all killed, and only one or eight years old was left in the family.
Eight Flags Army
Even because of the frequent dispatch, some people even found 80-year-old people on the front line who had to wear armor to the battlefield.
In the twenty-eighth year of Qianlong, Yonggui, counselor general of Kashgar, found a veteran of Solun who was over 80 years old among the soldiers. This man was the leader of butha, named Itosa, who had twice served in the North Road barracks as early as the Kang Yong dynasty. When Qianlong was on time in the nineteenth year, he was over seventy years old, but he was still selected as a cloak. In the twenty-third year of Qianlong's conquest, he went out on a campaign at the age of seventy-six.
Moreover, the Qing Dynasty's management of the Eight Banners of Guanwai was much stricter than that of the Green Camp, for example, in the twenty-third year of Qianlong, there was a soldier of the Eight Banners of Heilongjiang, Wu Lengche, who was replaced by a servant and quietly went home to visit his relatives, but the matter was discovered and reported to the Qianlong Emperor, who demanded strict handling, not only Wu Lengche was beheaded, but even the collar of WuLenche was also executed.
According to some scholars' statistics, from the 35th year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1696 AD) to the End of the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War (1894 AD), the officers and men of the Eight Banners of Heilongjiang and Jilin were recruited 69 times through the "Edict of the Commandments".
The result was a sharp decline in the number of troops in Heilongjiang and The Eight Banners of Jilin Province, such as the four-year Tongzhi General Fu Bao Shangshou "The number of soldiers in the province is 115,000, there are few camps, and half of them are disabled." ”
In summary, the combat effectiveness of the Eight Banners Army of the Qing Dynasty, especially the Eight Banners of Heilongjiang and Jilin outside Guanwai, has always maintained a fairly high level, of course, this is for the interior of East Asia.
This is also the basis for the Qing Dynasty to allow Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and other Han ministers to organize large-scale group training after the Taiping Rebellion.
At the same time, for the Eight Flags soldiers, not all the Eight Flags soldiers can lift caged birds, and there are also Eight Flags soldiers who are soldiers until they are 80 years old, and all the adult males in the family are killed.
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