In December 1937, Nanjing was on the verge of falling, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops. Most of the troops defending Nanjing were remnants of the army that had returned from the Battle of Songhu. Although there is little left in combat effectiveness, behind it is the capital of the country, and it can only fight to the death to exhaust the duty of its own soldiers.
For the Yuhuatai position, both China and Japan knew its importance, and the Japanese army conquered the Yuhua Gate and the Zhonghua Gate, which were completely exposed to the fangs of the Japanese army. So both the enemy and us have sent the elite of the elite. The Japanese sent the Sixth Division, while our army sent the 88th Division to defend.
On December 10, under the command of the commander of the Japanese division, Hase, the Japanese army poured 9,500 rounds of 75 and 150 mm shells into our positions, which can be described as uninterrupted fire. In terms of infantry, the Japanese army invested nearly 20,000 troops. Our 88th Division has less than 7,000 men, and coupled with the fact that the terrain restraint cannot fully expand the troops, it is simply worse. Only the 3500 men of the 262nd Brigade could be defended at the main road, and the rest were used as reserves.
After a day and a night of fighting between the enemy and us, the Japanese army as the attacking side suffered heavy losses, and many of the surviving soldiers later wrote in their diaries: "The frontal enemy is the eighty-eighth division of the first class in the Indochina army. "On December 12, due to the heavy casualties of the Sixth Division, the Japanese army had to deploy the 114th Division to enter the battle again, and at this time the entire personnel of the 262nd Brigade of our army had been killed or wounded, and Sun Yuanliang, the commander of the 88th Division, immediately ordered the 264th Brigade of the reserve force to quickly reinforce Yuhuatai.
When the Japanese army discovered that the Nationalist 264th Brigade had arrived at Yuhuatai as reinforcements, Prince Chichibumiya, as the supreme commander of the Nanjing front, immediately sent the 12th, 23rd, and 45th Regiments into the battlefield to attack the positions of the enemy 88th Division. At 13:00 on December 12, Gao Zhisong, commander of the 264th Brigade of the Nationalist Army, held out heroically until the last moment. Except for Liao Lingqi, the deputy brigade commander, who led more than a hundred remnants of troops to break through, the rest of the generals were martyred at the Yuhuatai position.
Finally, when the Japanese army rushed to the Yuhuatai position, they found a shocking scene. The back door of the bunker has long been locked, which means that the Chinese soldiers who are stubbornly resisting on the position have been preparing to fight the enemy to the death from the moment they enter the bunker! This scene made the Japanese army deeply admired, and could not help but pray for the dead soldiers of the 88th Division.
The loss of the Yuhuatai position also meant declaring the complete defeat of the Nanjing defense war. As the most elite unit in China at that time, the 88th Division sacrificed 2 brigade commanders, 3 regimental commanders and all battalion company-level officers on this small hill. For the Japanese army, the casualties in the attack on Yuhuatai also accounted for more than half of the entire siege of Nanjing. Although the later defense of Nanjing played almost zero role under Tang Shengzhi's faint command, the 88th Division fought the iron-blooded spirit of the Chinese army in this battle, and also laid the confidence of victory for the subsequent long-term War of Resistance!