In April 1938, after the Battle of Xuzhou, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops quickly left the battlefield. The Japanese army failed to achieve the operational goal of annihilating the main Chinese forces, and immediately adjusted its deployment and launched an attack on the eastern Henan region to which The Chinese First Theater belonged, in an attempt to capture and annihilate the main Chinese forces.
Kenji Toihara led the Japanese 14th Division across the Yellow River and advanced toward the Eastern Henan Plain. On May 17, its vanguard reached the east of Lanfeng and was blocked by Song Xilian's 71st Army, Gui Yongqing's 27th Army, and Xue Yue's Yudong Corps in neihuang, Mazhuangzhai, and Renheji.
At this time, there were about 200,000 people in the main force of China's First Theater of Operations in eastern Henan, and Toihara arrogantly commanded 20,000 Japanese troops to rush in. Chiang Kai-shek and all the generals of the Nationalist Army felt the contemptuous gaze wafting from the round head of Tu Ihihara.
Japanese war criminal Kenji Doihara
They are angry, but only anger is useless, and they have to speak with strength.
Chiang Kai-shek decided to teach TuFeiyuan a lesson.
This was perhaps the one Chiang Kai-shek had the most confidence in since the two sides went to war:
First, the Chinese army in eastern Henan is all the elite troops of the Central Army, and the other is that the ratio of strength between the two sides is almost close to ten to one.
Now it seems that it is not a question of victory, but how to completely annihilate the 14th Division.
The next deployment was also carried out according to the complete annihilation of the Japanese army.
On 21 May, Chinese troops launched a fierce offensive against the Japanese.
However, the Japanese fire was far greater than the Nationalists had imagined, and the 46th Division of the 27th Army was hit by heavy Japanese artillery and machine guns on the unsheltered plains, and the 138th Brigade of the 46th Division had to sound the charge horn not long after the battle.
As soon as the charge horn sounded, the soldiers who launched the charge fell one by one. Under the cover of the smoke screen, the soldiers who rushed to the japanese trenches launched a brutal hand-to-hand combat with the Japanese army.
By noon, the 138th Brigade was almost exhausted. Brigade
Ma Weilong
Very happy that his troops could fight bravely, he personally wrote two commendation orders, praising the five companies of the Japanese army for holding their positions and capturing them, and promoting platoon leader Wang Yongfu to company commander and deputy platoon leader Li Xun to platoon leader.
But when Li Xun was wounded and carried down, he saw Zhou Tianlu, who was in charge of the brigade commander's safety, standing next to a stretcher, on which was a flesh-and-blood blurred body.
Zhou Tianlu said that he accompanied the brigade commander to the forward position, and a shell hit the brigade commander, and all but one thigh was blown up.
One cried and finished, the other cried and listened, and then the two men began to cry with their heads in their hands.
Although the Japanese firepower was fierce, it gradually became a wolf under the encirclement of the superior strength of the Chinese army.
Toihara quickly concentrated the main force of the 14th Division and desperately rushed to the position of the 27th Army. The 27th Army had been fighting hard for many days, and finally could not fight any more, and scattered and fled.
Before the battle began, Gui Yongqing said to Qiu Qingquan without concern:
"It is difficult to win more with less, and what is so difficult to win more than less?"
Cowhide is good to blow, but the battle is fought thinly. Gui Yongqing could not control the fleeing troops, so he had to run with them.
Gui Yongqing, who loves to brag about cow skins
Before running, he left a heart eye, knowing that it was a great responsibility to lose Lan Feng, so he hurried to the commander of the 88th Division
Long Muhan
He wrote a note asking him to stick to Lan Feng and collect the scattered troops himself.
Actually? The Gui general "ran through Luowang Station in one breath."
The commanders have all run, but how long can the division commanders hold out? Long Muhan was quickly defeated.
Later got the news:
When the Japanese entered Lanfeng, they encountered little resistance from the Chinese army.
The loss of positions in wartime is the most unclear thing:
Lan Feng lost his defense, and some people blamed Long Muhan for withdrawing without authorization, but Long Muhan said that it was Gui Yongqing who made them move closer to the 71st Army, and he handed over the city defense to the 36th Division Engineer Company before withdrawing.
The ball kicks around, and someone has to follow—
On June 17, 1938, Long Muhan was shot in Wuhan on charges of losing command.
Really carried a pot for Gui Yongqing.
After the loss of Lanfeng, the Japanese 16th Division, which had come to rescue the 14th Division, also broke west under the leadership of Nakajima Imaga, trying to break through the encirclement of the Chinese army.
The 16th Division attacked at The Mountain. Responsible for defending this area was the 102nd Division of the 8th Army of the Qian Army, and the commander of the division was Bai Huizhang.
The 102nd Division participated in the Battle of Songhu, during which the officers and men fought bravely and suffered heavy casualties, and only the regimental commander was killed 2 people.
At dawn on 22 May, the defenders of the 102nd Division were surrounded by Japanese divisions, and the division headquarters lost contact with the regiments, and the regiments had to fight on their own.
During the battle, the commander of the 304th Regiment was killed, and more than half of the cadres at the battalion and company level were killed. The remaining two regiments, the 305th Regiment and the Supplementary Regiment, could only stand for reinforcements after the breakthrough failed. The division headquarters was surrounded inside the city, shelled by the Japanese, and almost penetrated by the Japanese army to encircle and suppress the city.
Bai Huizhang counted the telegrams one day and reported the battle situation to the military commander Huang Jie, but finally received them on the evening of the 25th."
The mountain does not have to be collected, and the mountain must not be lost
"The ambiguous telegram.
After discussing with the staff officers, Bai Huizhang decided to keep a little fire for the 102nd Division and lead the remnants to retreat. During the breakout, his brother Bai Charter was killed. After withdrawing from the battlefield, Bai Huizhang received orders and commendation orders from the military department to retreat.
Bai Hui zhang
Lan Feng and Yan Shan were lost, and the plan to encircle and annihilate The Land of Hihara was obviously in vain. Not only that, once the Japanese 14th and 16th Divisions were combined, it was very likely that they would go west to take Kaifeng and Zhengzhou.
Chiang Kai-shek was furious and appointed Xue Yue as the commander-in-chief of the First Corps, commanding all the troops in eastern Henan in a unified manner, regaining the initiative on the battlefield and eliminating Tufeiyuan.
Cheng Qian, on the other hand, set up the headquarters of the First Theater in Kaifeng, drew up a careful plan to encircle and annihilate the 14th Division, and was bound to wipe out Tufeiyuan in Lanfeng City.
In the afternoon of the 25th, the offensive began, and the two sides launched a tug-of-war, and the battle was very tragic.
After finally retaking Luowangzhai and Luowang Station, the Chinese army found Kenji Toihara's saber inside the village. The test found that this saber can cut 20 copper coins stacked together in half, which shows the exquisite craftsmanship of the Japanese saber.
On the 26th, Song Xilian commanded the 71st Army to retake Lanfeng. Among the captured warhorses, the soldiers picked the fattest and strongest one and named it "TuFeiyuan" and brought it to the military commander Song Xilian.
Japanese saber
Even the command knife was too late to take it, which showed how badly The Soil Iwaihara was running. If the campaign had caught him or forced him to cut himself in the stomach with a knife, China would have suffered less of the scourge from the number one spy in the years to come.
In fact, Tu Iwaiyuan also knew before he captured Lanfeng that the Chinese army wanted to eat him in its entirety.
At this time, he was deeply under siege, with heavy casualties, and supplies and rear communication were cut off. Therefore, he decided to make a desperate bet, with Lanfeng as the center, with the three surrounding villages Ofezhai Sanyizhai, Luowangzhai and Quxingzhai as the base, using each other as horns and waiting for help.
Now Lanfeng, Luowangzhai and Quxingzhai have been taken, and only Sanyizhai is left in The hands of Tufeiyuan. All the Japanese troops gathered in the small village, and in fear, Toihara seemed to see the emperor waving to him. For him, rather than being captured, it would be better to have a decent caesarean section.
On the 28th, Chiang Kai-shek also seemed to see the dawn of victory. He sent a warrant, saying that if this battle does not go as desired, it will be the "laughing stock of eternity"——
The enemy near Lanfeng is no more than five or six thousand at most, and I besieged buke with the strength of the Twelfth Division, not only the troops are complex, they blame each other, and they are defeated; even if they are conquered, they are also the laughing stock of a thousand ancient times in the history of war...
However, Chiang Kai-shek seemed to be happy earlier, and he forgot what the virtue of his proud protégé Gui Yongqing was.
On the 28th, the Japanese army, supported by cavalry, warplanes, and chariots, began to counterattack the 27th Army. Ignoring Chiang Kai-shek's order to concentrate his forces against the enemy, Gui Yongqing ordered the troops to shift their positions, trying to avoid the frontal attack of the Japanese army and looking for a breakthrough from the flank.
In the end, the 27th Army suffered as many as 2500 casualties, and did not take SanyiZhai until the 29th.
On the same day, the Japanese 16th Division captured the key area of Guide (present-day Shangqiu) in eastern Henan to the southeast of Lanfeng.
This was what Chiang Kai-shek feared most.
Nakajima's 16th Division began to attack the outskirts of Guide on the 26th, and Huang Jie led the 8th Army to collapse at a touch and immediately withdrew from the outer positions to the outskirts of Guide.
On the 27th, Cheng Qiandian, commander of the First Theater, insisted on guarding Guide, and could not give up Return to Germany until he took LanFeng.
But the command is yours, and the destiny is mine. Huang Jie retreated from Guide on the 2nd day, leaving only the 187th Division to defend Guide City.
Huang Jie
On the morning of the 29th, Peng Linsheng, commander of the 187th Division, also led his troops to withdraw from Guide, and the Japanese army occupied the area without spending a single shot.
Guide was behind the Chinese troops preparing to encircle and annihilate the 14th Division, so that the Chinese army was attacked by the enemy on its back and had to change from offensive to defensive position.
At the same time, the Japanese Mixed 4th Brigade was preparing to cross the Yellow River from the north, and the brigade was only separated from the 14th Division by the Yellow River and could be a division at any time. In addition, the Japanese 10th Division was mixed into the 13th Brigade Regiment and was marching towards Yudongqian.
In the current situation, the Chinese army in eastern Henan is in danger of being counter-encircled by the Japanese army.
On May 31, the commander-in-chief of China's First Theater of Operations reluctantly ordered a full retreat.
A battle with absolute superiority, the ending is so strange!
Who is to blame? I don't know, anyway, Chiang Kai-shek's words became a slur, and the result really became a "laughing stock for eternity."
It was no joke that the Japanese army, after a dispute over whether to pursue the Chinese army, began to pursue the Chinese troops retreating westward.
The orders of the Japanese North China Front were:
It is necessary to pursue the Chinese army all the way to the Pinghan line
。
The Pinghan Line runs through the four provincial capitals of Beiping, Shijiazhuang, Zhengzhou and Wuhan. If the Japanese army occupies this line, it will not only be able to quickly transfer troops and materials, but also be able to quickly advance to a vast area in the west on the basis of the Pinghan Line.
On June 4, the 14th and 16th Divisions of the Japanese Army surrounded Kaifeng, and the 141st Division of the Nationalist Army, under the leadership of division commander Song Kentang, desperately resisted for 2 days, and finally due to the inability to defeat the Japanese army in terms of strength and weapons, it had no choice but to retreat, and Kaifeng fell.
Although Xue Yue strictly ordered that anyone who retreated without authorization would be severely punished for corruption, no matter how strict the military order was, it could not tie the legs of those shameless generals who were eager to go first:
Zhang Dingguang, commander of a regiment of the 187th Division, withdrew from the defense area without authorization;
Zhang Shumin, chief of staff of the 187th Division, repeatedly instigated a retreat, and then secretly escaped himself;
Brigade Commander Xie Xizhen fled by car without asking the division commander;
Brigade commander Ye Geng often disappeared, and later someone saw him change his clothes and go to Hankou...
At present, these people are like jumping beam clowns, where is there a little bit of blood that a soldier should have?
During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, a lady wrote a poem in which two sentences were:
Fourteen thousand people were disarmed, and none of them were boys
。 "It is most appropriate to describe these generals of the Nationalist army.
Watching the Japanese army eat mulberry leaves like silkworms, one
City one
The city is occupied, and the central plains important town of Zhengzhou is in jeopardy. To this end, Chiang Kai-shek finally made up his mind: dig the yellow river embankment to stop the Japanese army from advancing.
The process is not to say, it hurts. But there is one detail to be said:
After several generals of the 39th Army, who carried out the task of breaking the embankment, took the blueprints and finalized the blasting point on the Yellow River embankment,
Huang Yingqing, commander of the engineer battalion, suddenly "pounced" and fell to his knees on the ground, clearing tears for a long time. Several other regimental commanders, battalion commanders, and engineers all knelt down in unison
The Yellow River is the mother river, which has given birth to a long and splendid Chinese civilization and has nurtured generations of Chinese children, but now it is used to stop foreign invaders.
How can this be tolerated?
At the Battle of Lanfeng, the Nationalist army had 200,000 people, but it failed to eliminate the More than 20,000-strong Tufeiyuan Division.
Of course, there were factors in the Japanese army's strong combat effectiveness and advanced weapons and equipment, but the commander of the Nationalist army escaped from the battlefield and the army was scattered, which was the most important reason for the defeat in the war.
The excavation of the Yellow River embankment, although it delayed the Japanese army's battle plan, gave time for the defense of Wuhan. However, the Yellow River flooded a large number of cultivated fields in more than 40 counties along the coast, drowned more than 800,000 civilians, and left more than 10 million people homeless, thus forming the Flood Zone of the Yellow River for many years.
If the autumn is settled, who can escape the generals who have escaped from the battlefield?