The 74th Army of the Kuomintang Army (that is, the reorganized 74th Division) was known as one of the five main forces of the Anti-Japanese Tiger Army and the Liberation War. In the Battle of Lianghuai, the Battle of Lianshui, and the Battle of Menglianggu, they all caused a lot of trouble to our army. The 74th Army had jurisdiction over the 51st, 57th, and 58th Divisions, of which the main force, the 58th Division, was the consort of Yu Jishi, the first commander of the 74th Army. In fact, originally this unit was just the Beiyang Descending Army, and it was a real miscellaneous army. How did it become the Central Army and become an ace unit? This is a little-known piece of history.
1. The 58th Division of chen yaohan, the old slippery head
The 58th Division of the Kuomintang Army, whose predecessor was the first to be the descending army of the Beiyang Army. In 1927, seeing that the general situation of the Beiyang Army was gone, Chen Yaohan, then the chief of staff of Chu Yupu, a general under the Shandong warlord Zhang Zongchang of the Beiyang Army, led part of the Beiyang Army to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek's Anhui warlord and commander of the Thirty-seventh Army, Chen Tiaoyuan. Chen Yaohan's troops participated in the War of Guigui and received the title of the newly formed 26th Division.
In 1931, affected by the impeachment case of the Jianghuai Rice Boat Massacre, Chiang Kai-shek took the opportunity to weaken Chen Tiaoyuan's military power, and the newly formed 26th Division was reorganized into the 58th Division of the C-type Division of the Second Brigade and Four Regiments, and was able to break away from Chen Tiaoyuan's control and be stationed in Henan Shangcheng. Subsequently, the 58th Division participated in the encirclement and suppression of the Red Fourth Front and the Red Twenty-fifth Army in the Eyu-Anhui Soviet Region, and Chen Yaohan knew that he was a miscellaneous army, and in order to retain military power, he always preserved his strength when fighting the Red Army.
In the Battle of Shanghuang in January 1932, Chen Yaohan saw that the reinforcements of the 2nd Division of Tang Enbo were defeated by the Red Army, so he simply led his troops to abandon the city and flee south. In the Battle of Panjiahe in April 1933, when the Wan Yaohuang Department of the 13th Division was fighting fiercely with the Red Army, Chen Yaohan refused to send reinforcements under the pretext of heavy rain and communication equipment failure. Relying on the cleverness of selling his teammates, Chen Yaohan's troops have not suffered any major losses.
2. Participate in the attack on the Red Second and Sixth Armies
In October 1934, after meeting the division in Qiandong, the Red Second and Sixth Armies decided to return to the Xiang'e border to establish a base area. After two victories in the Battle of Longjiazhai and the Battle of Huanxi River, the Red Army severely damaged the warlord Chen Quzhen in western Hunan and the Luo Qijiang department of the independent 34th Brigade, gained a firm foothold on the edge of Xiang'e, and once arrived at the city of Changde, a major town in western Hunan Province.
Xu Yuanquan, a Hubei warlord and commander-in-chief of the Sixteenth Route Army, was afraid that the Red Army would take the opportunity to develop into Hubei and retake the Laosu district of Honghu Lake, so he transferred his 10th Army and the 34th, 44th, and 58th Divisions under his control to deal with the Red Second and Sixth Armies. The Hunan warlord He Jian also actively cooperated, and the two warlords pieced together eight divisions, four brigades, and four security regiments with a total strength of nearly 100,000 troops, and the soldiers were divided into six routes to kill the newly established Xiang'echuanqian base area.
At this time, the Red Second and Sixth Armies had grown from 7,700 men at the time of the first division to more than 11,700 men, in addition to more than 3,000 local armed forces and more than 1,100 logistics units. In the face of the enemy's heavy encirclement and suppression, He Long proposed to move behind the enemy's rear to mobilize the enemy, but it was not approved, and after a collective vote, the others still decided to seek and annihilate the enemy in the base area. However, since several Xiang armies were Xiao Ke's old rivals, they were more cautious in combat. The Red Army, after several battles such as Xikou, Sorghum Ping, Meridian Terrace, and Houping, failed to annihilate the enemy all the way, but instead sacrificed several regiment-level cadres such as Xiong Zhongqing, Liu Zhigao, and Zhou Zhibin.
Under the oppression of the Kuomintang army, the Red Second and Sixth Armies were forced to retreat step by step, and the only two county towns in the base area, Dayong and Sangzhi, and Wota, the seat of the provincial party committee, were successively lost. He Long, Xiao Ke, and others thought that the base area had been lost, so they held a meeting and decided to cross the Yangtze River north to the area of western Hubei to establish a new base area. Chen Yaohan's column (under the jurisdiction of the 58th Division and the Provisional 4th Brigade), which had just occupied the county seat of Sangzhi, did not know the change in the deployment of the Red Army, and the positive troops pursued the Red Army in three ways.
3. Annihilate the 172nd Brigade
Chenjiahe is a small market town on the east bank of Lishui, located in the west of Sangzhi County, sixty miles west of the county, is a small basin in the surrounding mountains, and is still an important traffic artery in the xiangxi region, and the S305 provincial highway passes through the town. The northward route of the Red Second and Sixth Armies passes right through here. Walking in the middle of Chen Yaohan's column was the 172nd Brigade of the 58th Division, and at five o'clock in the afternoon of April 12, 1935, the search team of the 172nd Brigade and the Red Army's avant-garde regiment made contact west of the Chenjia River, and after a brief exchange of fire, each side captured several prisoners alive from each other.
Li Yanling, commander of the 172nd Brigade, learned from his captives that a large Red Army force was passing through the Chenjia River, so he ordered his troops to advance rapidly to intercept the Red Army in motion. He Long, Xiao Ke, and others also interrogated the prisoners and learned that the enemy's strength was only two regiments, so they decided to concentrate on eating this enemy force. Since the Red Army was marching columns from south to north, it had not yet been assembled. He Long then ordered the troops to build fortifications nearby, planning to wait for all the troops to arrive, and then induce the enemy to attack, so as to seize the opportunity to counterattack.
The troops of the 172nd Brigade were also assembling at chenjiahe in a column of troops, and Li Yanling was eager to fight, and before all the troops arrived, he led an infantry battalion that had just been assembled to attack the Red Army positions on the morning of the 13th. At this time, the Red Army had not yet arrived in its entirety, and the troops stationed on the positions were the troops of the Red Second Army, who were good at climbing mountains but not good at position warfare, and if they wanted to lure the enemy deeper, they fought and retreated to several hills. The two regimental commanders under Li Yanling advised him to postpone the attack and wait for the two armies on the left and right to arrive, but Li Yanling said: "There is no hurry, and we will solve the last enemy force." ”
By four o'clock in the afternoon of the 13th, the regiments of the Red Sixth Army, which were acting as rear guards, had been assembled, and Xiao Ke and Wang Zhenqin led their troops to rush down from the positions on the mountain and launch a general attack on the enemy. After two hours of fierce fighting, the 172nd Brigade was completely defeated, wang Binrui, the commander of the 343rd Regiment, was killed on the spot, and Sun Fanglan, the commander of the 344th Regiment, was captured. The left and right guards advised Li Yanling to flee quickly, but Li Yanling refused: "I have never lost a battle in my life, and now that the whole army is destroyed, what face will I have to see Master Chen again?" "He said that he carried a large knife to fight the Red Army, and was finally killed by the Red Army.
Fourth, take advantage of the victory to pursue and annihilate the headquarters of the 58th Division
Chen Yaohan personally led the 58th Division's direct subordinate unit, the 174th Brigade Headquarters, and the 348th Regiment as the general reserve, and after receiving Li Yanling's telegram from the enemy, rushed to the town of Chenjiahe for reinforcements. When they reached Lianghekou Township, they encountered the defeated soldiers who had fled back in front of them, and learned that the 172nd Brigade had been annihilated, and the 347th Regiment and the new battalion walking on the right side of the road were also defeated. Chen Yaohan was afraid that he would be ambushed if he went further, so he once again played the old tradition of selling his teammates, and immediately fled south with his troops, hoping to move closer to Guo Rudong's 26th Division stationed in Wota.
Chen Yaohan's sixth sense was indeed correct, Xiao Ke, the commander of the Red Sixth Army, was not in a hurry to clean up the battlefield, and when he learned from the captives that the enemy still had a division headquarters and a brigade nearby, he personally led the 51st and 53rd regiments to pursue to the south. When Chen Yaohan led his troops to Peach Creek, which was eighty kilometers south of the Chenjia River, he thought it was safe enough, so he stopped to rest. Unexpectedly, Xiao Ke's troops followed behind his ass, and when Xiao Ke walked to a small river five kilometers away from Peach Creek, he saw that the river was muddy, judging that the enemy had just passed, and immediately organized his troops to attack the enemy.
Chen Yaohan would be completely defenseless, the fortifications were not done, and the vigilance was not released. Although the total strength of the two regiments of the Red Army was less than 2,000 people, and the Nationalist army had more than 4,000 people, it was immediately chaotic under the attack of the Red Army. Not long after, the 10th Regiment of the 4th Division of the Red Second Army also came to reinforcements, and the fierce battle was fought until more than 8 o'clock in the evening, and the Nationalist army suffered heavy casualties. At this time, it suddenly began to pour down in the sky, and Zhang Jingminghe, commander of the 173rd Brigade, took the opportunity to lead the remnants to escape from the battlefield under the cover of nightfall.
Chen Yaohan and Zhou Zhixian, the division's chief of staff, were trapped on a hill, and seeing that the Red Army had attacked the hill and were engaged in hand-to-hand combat with his guard company, Chen Yaohan was ready to raise his pistol and commit suicide. His aide-de-camp, Chen Zhong, took down his pistol and pushed him down the hill, and Chen Zhong himself rolled down the hill with several guards. In this way, Chen Yaohan luckily escaped the fate of being captured by the Red Army, but his chief of staff, Zhou Zhixian, eventually fell into the hands of the Red Army.
5. The 58th Division after its defeat
In the two battles of Chenjiahe and Taozixi, the Red Second and Sixth Armies annihilated three infantry regiments and a mountain artillery battalion belonging to the 58th Division of the Kuomintang Army, and captured 2,000 guns and 2 mountain artillery. These 2 mountain guns played a major role in the ensuing battle. One of them also followed the Red Army's Long March to northern Shaanxi and is still on display in the Beijing Military Museum.
After this battle, the Red Second and Sixth Armies also abandoned their plans to cross the Yangtze River in the north, and instead specialized in attacking several divisions of xu yuanquan's department of the Hubei Army, which was relatively weak in combat effectiveness. After several battles in Zhongbao, Longshan and Chestnut Garden, the enemy's encirclement and suppression was finally broken and the Xiang'echuanqian base area was recovered.
After the war, the remnants of the 58th Division, counting the captives released by the Red Army, were only more than 5,000 troops. This meant that the division lost more than 5,000 soldiers (especially riflemen and artillery) (more than 10,000 in the pre-war division) in the battles of Chenjiahe and Peach Creek. Chen Yaohan was shot in the foot, but his life was not in serious trouble, and he only lay in the hospital for more than ten days, but his military career finally came to an end. Chiang Kai-shek dismissed him on the grounds of ineffective operational command, and was succeeded by his fellow Zhejiang compatriot Yu Jishi, a student of the Huangpu I period, as commander of the 58th Division.
Yu Jishi came with three Zhejiang security regiments and formed a new 172nd Brigade, and the remnants of the original 58th Division were organized as the 174th Brigade. Since Zhang Jingming, the commander of the 174th Brigade, was not a close associate of Yu Jishi, he naturally belonged to the figure who stood on the sidelines. In December 1935, Yu Jishi demoted Zhang Jingming to deputy division commander, and the brigade commander was succeeded by Wu Jiguang, a student of the huangpu second term. At this point, the miscellaneous army of the 58th Division finally became a veritable Central Army, and later became the main force of the 74th Army. It can be said that the fiasco that He Long and Xiao Ke gave to the 58th Division was blessed by misfortune.
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