The Survival Wisdom of the Beiyang Era (167): Playing tricks on the spot.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, although the Huai Army was said to have turned the tide for the Qing court, in the eyes of professional British officers, the posture of the soldiers and soldiers firing their guns was very strange, although they fired their guns forward, but their eyes were staring elsewhere, without any concept of shooting aiming. At the same time, although the Beiyang Fleet was completely destroyed, it was not completely inferior in the hard-hitting engagement, but the Qing army army, which was mainly the Huai Army, was vulnerable in foreign wars, and it would be defeated in every battle, all the way back to Shanhaiguan from the peninsula, and the Lushun Fortress that had been in operation for many years was defended for two weeks, and it fled in the mountains of ordnance, so that the Japanese army found that the Qing army in the battle, every exchange of fire was a scramble to release guns, one after another, until the bullets were finished, that is, the time for the Qing army to retreat. As for aiming at killing and injuring the enemy, it does not seem to be taken into account. More than thirty years later, several new armies in the Qing court came to the fore, but the problem of not aiming guns at that time still did not change much.
In the Gengzi chaos, the first to attack the pavilion area was Dong Xiangfu's "Gan Army", more than 10,000 people and horses were full of momentum, the equipment was definitely not the impression of the big knife and spear, but not inferior to the modern firearms of the coalition army, plus the tens of thousands of boxers who assisted in the battle surrounded the pavilion area like an iron barrel, but after several months of fighting, they were still unable to attack for a long time, and these soldiers carried sufficient bullets, but in the fierce stage of the battle, the flying bullets in the sky were like rain, but they could rarely hurt the enemy on the battlefield, and as for the requirements for aiming, they had long been forgotten. As one of the several main forces of the Qing court, the Gan army is still like this, and the other Qing troops are not much different, as for the Beiyang New Army with German-style exercises, aiming is of course a compulsory course for soldiers, but the specific application in actual combat is greatly discounted.
Later, as the soldiers cut their braids and walked down according to the standard procedures of prussian soldiers, the Beiyang New Army can also be regarded as a decent modern soldier, but the problem of not aiming at the war is still my own way. After Zhang Xun's restoration, Duan Qirui, who raised troops in the horse factory, and the men and horses of nearly three divisions under his command were all the strong troops of the Beiyang warlords, and the battle against more than 5,000 people who were stubbornly resisting the braid army should have been a fierce battle, but the reality was that "the place where the war was the hottest, and no bird could fly safely through the sky, because the direction of shooting seemed to be the sky." "As the main attack of the Anhui warlords in the direction of Zhang Xun's mansion, the sound of gunfire continued from five o'clock in the morning to three o'clock in the afternoon, and a large number of soldiers and pawns lined up in layers fired continuously with machine guns and rifles, at a distance of less than one hundred and fifty meters, and the towering city wall in the middle, although the two sides fired millions of rounds of bullets, it seemed that not even one of them hit the city wall. The victims of the fierce fighting are passers-by who have inadvertently passed by. So much so that the foreigners slightly ironically suggested to the Beiyang Center: "The resumption of the use of bows and arrows will not only reduce the waste of ordnance, but also pose a real threat to the rebels." ”
In the end, it is not difficult to find that the well-equipped army from the last years of the Qing Dynasty to the Beiyang period was facing the enemy who was in a backward state, so that it could be defeated after a bombardment and shooting, but when it really encountered the use of the same level of foreign guns and cannons, there was no need to aim, and the battle method of casually releasing guns was directly stopped, and the war also became a kind of family-style hustle, like a crusade against Zhang Xun's restoration, the two sides spent millions of rounds of ammunition, and finally lost dozens of people. The Zhiwan War was a duel between more than 200,000 people, but the battle losses were two or three hundred, not to mention that when the Sichuan warlords were in a scuffle, there would be idle people who came out to watch, just like watching Sichuan opera. However, they finally began to emphasize marksmanship and aiming, and in the lessons of the success of the king and the defeat, a decent war began to break out, of course, more cold-blooded and cruel.