In the Battle of Pingxingguan, although the Japanese troops were ambushed by the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army, on the surface they were only the "heavy troops" of the 21st Brigade of the 5th Division of Itagaki Seishiro.
However, what many people have not noticed is that those who served as escorts and rescuers of this Japanese "heavy unit" were all elite combat squadrons of Japanese divisions and regiments, and it should be known that in 1937, the Japanese troops that participated in the war were all "first-class divisions".
So, at that time, was this battle of Pingshiguan good or not? Of course not easy to fight! Before the soldiers of the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army set out, they were carefully selected and took the only "best equipment" in their hands.
In addition, insufficient ammunition seriously restricted the ambush firepower of our army, so before the ambush battle broke out, the commander of our army emphasized the need to occupy the terrain advantage and attach importance to the suddenness of the attack.
However, at about 11:00 a.m., when the main force of the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army fought fiercely with the Japanese heavy troops on the front line from Laoyemiao to Xiaozhai Village, the Third Combat Brigade of the Japanese 21st Wing had rushed to the battlefield to rescue.
To make matters worse, the Japanese also sent two fighters to assist in the battle over the air. Because of this, the commander of our army resolutely issued an order: the soldiers rushed down with bayonets and engaged in a white-knife battle with the Japanese army to avoid a targeted attack by Japanese fighters.
As soon as the two sides fought in close combat, those "Veterans of the Red Army" who had been in the battlefield for a long time immediately felt something was wrong: the Japanese army was completely different from the previous national army, and the level of stabbing of these Japanese soldiers was much higher than that of the soldiers of the national army!
In a scuffle, these Japanese soldiers were also very organized, they were "panicked but not chaotic"! Almost all of them formed a temporary combat group of two people and a few people, and they were very good at relying on temporary positions to carry out "on-the-spot counter-charge".
To tell the truth, the individual combat capabilities of these invading Japanese troops in China were skillful and crazy, and the various combat groups also tacitly covered each other. Under these circumstances, although the Eighth Route Army was on the offensive side, it suffered heavy casualties.
However, it is necessary to know that the commander's "improvisational" ability is also a magic weapon of our army! Therefore, in order to reduce unnecessary casualties, the Eighth Route Army began to change its strategy and consciously used its superiority in strength to "divide" the various combat groups of the Japanese army.
Soon, a scene of three or five soldiers of our army dealing with a devil was formed in the local part of the battlefield. But even so, until this "devil" died in battle and fell, he would be stabbed with at least two or three knives on his body.
According to statistics, at that time, the two armies fought for half an hour with bayonets, and finally the Japanese side could not resist it first: the Chinese army on the other side was different from before, and the combat effectiveness of the Chinese soldiers encountered this time suddenly became stronger!
Then these "devils" stopped fighting with the Eighth Route Army with bayonets, and they went under the car to block the shooting. In addition, they also began to consciously seize the commanding heights of the battlefield.
The soldiers of the "Old Red Army" of the Eighth Route Army who came all the way from the war naturally quickly understood the Japanese's intentions. As a result, the two sides began to compete fiercely around the high point of the Old Master Temple. In order to take down this important commanding height on the battlefield, the two sides fought brutally for more than an hour, and the commanding heights of the Laoye Temple changed hands several times!
Later, a battalion of the Eighth Route Army rushed up from the side, so that the Eighth Route Army that had seized the Laoye Temple in the front had no worries, relying on throwing grenades to mute the Japanese machine guns mounted on the top of the mountain, and finally the Eighth Route Army successfully occupied the Laoye Temple.
As for the fierce battle for the Laoye Temple, the Japanese army's own historical records are recorded as follows: "After Pingxingguan was ambushed by the Chinese army, the Longze Squadron did not "carefully" enter the ambush area of the Laoye Temple until the arrival of reinforcements on September 28.
As a result, they were really shocked when they looked at it in the past: "The ditch is full of the corpses of Japanese soldiers, which is a rare scene seen in previous battles with the Chinese army." It can be said that the Battle of Pingxingguan made the Japanese army begin to re-examine the "combat ability" of the Chinese army.
Because they really ignored this Chinese "red army" before, which is also a people's army that often "defeats the strong with the weak"! For the commanders and fighters of the Eighth Route Army, they did not have much "understanding" of the Japanese soldiers before the war!
When the 115th Division mobilized before the war, it had planned to capture 1,000 Japanese prisoners, but in the end it did not capture even a single live prisoner. In order to capture prisoners in battle, these old Red Army soldiers even paid "unnecessary" sacrifices.
Some of the fighters still thought they were fighting with the Nationalists, so they shouted at the Japanese hiding under the car: Surrender your guns and don't kill! But it turned out not to be prisoners, but to be frantically fired by Japanese soldiers.
Some soldiers of the Eighth Route Army, in the spirit of "humanitarianism", tried to rescue the wounded Japanese lying on the ground groaning, but they did not expect that these Japanese wounded secretly pulled out grenades hidden behind them...
A deputy battalion commander of a regiment of the Eighth Route Army was actually bitten off the ear by this frenzied Japanese prisoner of war when he was retreating with a Japanese wounded man on his back. When the platoon leader next to him saw this, he was so angry that he chopped off the head of this Japanese madman.
After witnessing this series of "sudden" situations, all the officers and men of the Eighth Route Army can be described as "filled with righteous indignation"! They also understood that these were inhuman Japanese troops, not the nationalist forces they had fought in the past.
However, it was in this extremely difficult and complicated situation that the 115th Division finally succeeded in completely annihilating more than a thousand Japanese troops in the encirclement. In this battle, the Japanese heavy troops were almost "completely wiped out", and only three Japanese wounded were rescued by Japanese reinforcements.
However, although the ambush was successful, the Eighth Route Army did not capture a single prisoner, which was also "unprecedented" in the history of the Red Army. However, although this ambush campaign was small, it greatly encouraged the determination of the whole country to resist the war: the Japanese army was not invincible, they could be completely defeated!
At that time, as soon as the news of the victory of the Pingxingguan ambush came, Old Jiang's side was also "very excited and encouraged"! After all, before this victory, the Nationalist army really had not fought any "decent" victories.
At that time, Old Jiang excitedly sent congratulatory messages to Zhu De and Peng Dehuai, which read: "In the Battle of the 25th (PingxingGuan Dajie), your troops annihilated the enemy like a hemp, which is enough to prove that the officers and men used their lives to fight."
"Historical Miscellaneous Talk Station" image source network, invasion and deletion! Author: World War II Beauty