preface
On September 18, 1931, the Japanese Kwantung Army in northeast China suddenly attacked Shenyang and invaded and occupied northeast China by force.
The September 18 Incident was the beginning of The Attempt by Japanese Imperialism to conquer China by force. Since then, the Chinese people have begun a 14-year arduous War of Resistance Against Japan.
This is a history that cannot be forgotten!
To this day, Japan's heart to die is still immortal, and it follows the US imperialists in advocating the Theory of the Chinese threat, insists on intervening in the Taiwan Strait issue, and even does not hesitate to intervene by force.
On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the 918 Incident, @Fenghua Absolute Generation Xiao'er decided to relive history with friends from now on, and keep in mind the national shame. In this way, we should encourage Chinese youth in the new era to bear in mind their hearts, work hard to become stronger, be vigilant against Japan's revival of militarism, strive to be "China's new anti-Japanese youth in the 21st century," dare to be the "backbone of the nation," and prevent problems before they occur, so as to avoid the recurrence of historical tragedies.
After the September 18 Incident, the Japanese army slaughtered the Chinese people
sequence
In the fourteen years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the flames of war were entangled in Hunan for seven years.
As if to confirm the saying of a long time ago: "If the Chinese nation is dead, unless the people of Hunan are dead"!
Here, the War of Resistance entered a stalemate; here, the Japanese struggled his last madness; here, six large-scale battles, so that the blood went deep into the land.
The waves crash on the shore, the lonely city fights to the death, the sorrow and resistance, the pain and awakening, to explore the strength that supported this land in that era, what thirty million Hunan fathers have done and experienced.
On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the outbreak of the 918 Incident, @Fenghua Peerless Xiao Xiao group took 18 fragments of memories and opened a magnificent picture of the Hunan War of Resistance - "Use Me to Xiangzhuang River and Mountain".
Hunan, the pain of the Wokou, the gall of China.
The 90th anniversary of the 918 Incident, don't forget the national shame!
Use me a Xiangzhuang River Mountain Chapter Three: Wenxi Fire
New Wall River
Xinqiang River, between Yueyang and Miluo in northern Hunan Province. This small river, which is no more than two meters deep during the flood season and less than two feet deep during the dry period, has been the confrontation between the Chinese and Japanese armies for five years.
The new wall river looks more than 100 kilometers south, and there is a place called the new river in Changsha City, which is only one word away from the new wall river. This difference in words is said to be not unrelated to a man-made fire that followed.
At the moment of the fire, Zhou Enlai, Ye Jianying and a group of other communists happened to be in Changsha City, and they personally experienced the catastrophe and became the first organizers to carry out post-disaster relief.
That day was November 12, 1938, also known as Wen Day. History: Wenxi Fire.
The city of Changsha was on fire
After the Wenxi fire, Chongqing's Xinhua Daily published a commentary entitled "On 'Solid Walls and Clear Fields'"
"We cannot agree at all with this method of "burning" without mobilizing the people, relying on the people, and not caring about the people's suffering. Such an approach would lose its original intention of clearing the wilderness, would make the masses inexplicable, and would make the enemy more capable of carrying out conspiracies of deception. ”
Sure enough, after the Wenxi fire, because the front line was too long and it was still uncertain whether to continue to attack the Japanese Kou in Hunan, they gave up their plans to go south, and began to launch a propaganda machine to attack the Kuomintang government in a big way, not sympathizing with the people's suffering, and deliberately creating a tragic case of burning Changsha.
So, what is the truth of the Wenxi Fire?
Wenxi fire alarm clock
In The Tianxin Pavilion Park in Changsha City, the alarm bells are always ringing, like crying. A large bell, two huge ruins of the broken wall, an antique hemp stone floor, and a sculpture of Changsha after the Wenxi fire. Bleak and tragic.
In 1997, the Changsha Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference organized an investigation into the Wenxi fire case, and collected and compiled the reminiscences and oral accounts of witnesses, called "Changsha Fire". Editor-in-chief Liang Xiaojin, an expert in local history in Changsha.
In the book "The Great Fire of Changsha", in addition to the articles of the main parties of Zhang Zhizhong, there are also some witnesses who are not known to outsiders, providing a lot of details.
The truth of history is gradually becoming clear.
The former site of the He Jian Mansion in Changsha
From November 7 to 9, 1939, at the He Jian Mansion in Changsha, Chiang Kai-shek held a military conference and once again stressed the need to carry out the "scorched earth war" in Changsha.
He accused Chen Cheng, who had previously served as the commander of the Wuhan garrison, saying that Chen Cheng did not burn Wuhan as planned and was a stupid person who neither obeyed the order nor obeyed the order.
On November 10, Zhang Zhizhong, chairman of Hunan Province, announced that the whole city would be evacuated urgently, and ordered the commander of the Changsha garrison, Yi Ti, to formulate a plan to burn the city.
Zhang Zhizhong, then chairman of Hunan Province
The next day, the Japanese army occupied Yueyang, the news spread to Changsha, for a time rumors spread, many citizens thought that "the devils have been killed under the city of Changsha."
At that time, the wounded on the front line were full of hospitals, and many people were lying on the streets, groaning and shouting, and the crowd mistakenly believed that the Japanese had arrived in the suburbs. The soldiers of the provincial security corps prepared to burn the city when Changsha fell, and detained cars everywhere in the city of Changsha to transport arson fuel, equipment and the retreat of the arson troops, and the common people felt the approaching of the Japanese army even more.
Chiang Kai-shek persisted in the scorched earth war
At 9:00 a.m. on November 12, Zhang Zhizhong received an urgent telegram from Chiang Kai-shek, "If Changsha falls, we must burn the whole city down. ”
As soon as Zhang Zhizhong received the telegram, he quickly summoned the Changsha garrison commander Yan Wei and the provincial government's security guards to call Xu Quan and handed it over to two people to handle, which was sponsored by Yan Wei and co-organized by Xu Quan. As a result, as soon as he returned to the organ, he immediately summoned his chief of staff and the chief of the general staff and asked them to draw up a plan for burning the city.
The full name of the city burning plan was called the "Outline of the Plan for Destroying Changsha", and the specific drafter was Xu Quan, chief of staff of the Changsha Garrison Command.
Xu Quan, chief of staff of changsha police headquarters
At 4 p.m., Xu Quan handed over the plan to Yu Ti for review, and after reading it, Xu Wei changed a place. Arson equipment and gasoline kerosene were sent to every combat company, and The company was converted into a squad.
This was one of the mistakes of the whole plan, and the biggest mistake, which led to a situation that was completely uncontrollable.
At 6 p.m., Zhang Zhizhong instructed in the plan, "Until 4 o'clock in the morning, I will review it." After completing the task, Zhang Zhizhong left the provincial capital and went to a banquet for the leaders of the Anglo-American church in Changsha.
Yu And the others began to get busy with the review.
The Whampoa Military Academy period
November 12 is the birthday of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the country. At 10 o'clock that night, Changsha Mayor Xi Chulin led more than 300 people to hold a celebration of the so-called 10,000 torch parade.
At the same time, there are another group of people in Changsha who have also begun to move around the streets and alleys of Changsha. They were the set-off members who were ready to be examined by Zhang Zhizhong.
50 arson squads began to mark the walls with lime, and every house with the word "jiao" written on it was placed next to a barrel of gasoline or kerosene.
In order to improve the preparation work, the train was also filled with gasoline and changed to a train.
Two hours later, Changsha became a huge gasoline depot that burned at one point.
Changsha City in 1931
This is the second error. After later judging that it was an accidental fire, the Security Command quickly notified the police chief Wen Chongfu and asked for a fire truck to be dispatched to fight the fire, but Wen Chongfu and the police station people withdrew, but it was "the police station was withdrawn, and the fire brigade was also withdrawn." The rescue train was full of gasoline. In this way, a large number of officials in Changsha City watched the fire burn the city.
At two o'clock in the morning on November 13, it was still two hours before Zhang Zhizhong's review time. Suddenly, a fire broke out in the direction of the South Gate, and in less than a quarter of an hour, there were three more fires at the South Gate, and then hundreds of fires in the city flew into the air, and the fire began to spread throughout the city, and Changsha was a sea of fire...
Where did the first fire come from? Xu Quan, the chief planner of the arson at the time, wrote in his recollection: "I judged that it was a fire in one place and three sets of fire. In the book "Changsha Fire", the memories of four of them also confirm Xu Quan's judgment.
Liang Xiaojin and Chen Xianshu
"There was a fire at the Wounded Soldiers Hospital outside the South Gate." - Kou Weiyong
"When the military police mobilized the citizens to relocate, they took the opportunity to enter the house and rob it, fearing that they would be exposed and set fires in advance." ——Xu Shilin, "Remembering the Night of the Great Fire in Changsha"
"Ding Sen, a member of the Self-Defense Corps, set himself on fire out of righteous indignation."
"An accidental fire caused the whole city to burn." Liang Xiaojin analyzed that the South Gate Wounded Soldiers Hospital lit the first fire of Changsha Wenxi, and the original source of the fire was probably from a soldier's cigarette butt.
"At that time, the soldiers were not highly educated and lacked common sense. There was a soldier smoking a cigarette next to a gasoline barrel, and one of the old comrades wrote the most detailed in the memoirs, and the soldier who smoked was his relative. Things didn't go well later, and the soldier quickly hid back, crying in fear, afraid that he would drag himself to be shot. ”
Ruins of Changsha Xuegong
In Xueyuan Street, Tianxin District, Changsha City, there is a granite stone square with the inscription "Daoguan Ancient and Modern" four words, quietly standing in the middle of the downtown. This is the ruins of the Changsha Provincial Xuegong.
Changsha Fuxue Palace was built during the Northern Song Dynasty, when the grandest and grandest school in Changsha was only this granite stone workshop about 10 meters high and 6 meters wide.
To this day, there are still obvious traces of black fire on the stone square, which was left by the Wenxi fire in 1938, and the Changsha Fuxue Palace was burned to the ground, and at the same time, the thousand-year-old Jinghua of Changsha City was burned.
Tianxin Pavilion in 1915
Since Kangxi pacified three times, Changsha City has basically not fought a war, so it has been built very well. Especially after arriving at the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, because the Xiang Army rose up, 13 governors came from Hunan, so they all built houses in Changsha, such as Zuo Zongtang's house on Cai Yi Road, there are many good houses, residences, and schools, and schools under construction. But it was the Wenxi fire that was all destroyed, basically destroyed.
Changsha in 1931
Liang Zhilong was born in Changsha in 1923, and his father was a teacher at Miaofeng High School. When the news of the fall of Wuhan reached Changsha, panic followed. The provincial and municipal governments and units, as well as the citizens, are busy moving.
Changsha before the Wenxi fire
In early November, 15-year-old Liang Zhilong moved with Miaofeng High School to a village in Jiujiang Temple, Hexi, Changsha, 50 miles away. A few days after moving to Hexi, one night he was awakened by the shouts of his landlord.
"The landlord called us, Changsha is on fire, you go to see it, your home may be burning." We were like the children in the countryside, climbing to the back of the mountain, to the top of the mountain to see, looking to the east, that place in the Changsha area, the whole black smoke arched upwards, a sound, there was a fire, a sound, there was a fire, the whole sky, that piece was black, and there was a lot of ash, burned pieces of paper, cloth pieces flew towards us, we stood on the top of the mountain, the pieces of paper that flew were so big as palms, probably burned pieces of cloth, we could catch it in our hands. ”
Liang Zhilong survived, but the people in Changsha City, who had no time to move, suffered a catastrophe.
Xi Chulin, the mayor of Changsha at the time
Xi Chulin, the mayor of Changsha at the time, wrote in his memoirs:
"When the fire broke out, the citizens woke up from their dreams, faced with the raging fire, there was no way to the heavens, there was no way into the ground, and the cries of the old, young, women and children and the explosions from the burning houses merged into one, forming an extremely tragic scene."
An old man in Yujia Lane was surrounded by a fire, jumped into a water tank to hide, and was boiled alive.
At the Yaowang Street Shelter for Wounded Soldiers, more than a dozen wounded soldiers hid in a well, and as a result, the wall collapsed to cover the wellhead, and all of them were buried alive.
Along the Xiang River, countless people fleeing for refugees gathered, and as a result, many people were squeezed into the cold Xiang River, and a large number of ships were sunk due to overloading, drowning countless people.
Tianxin Pavilion was burned down
When the people who were lucky enough to escape the sea of fire, looking back, Changsha City had been destroyed. Overnight, most of the citizens of Changsha became homeless refugees.
After the fire burned for five days and five nights, and after the fire stopped, Liang Zhilong returned to Changsha. The former bustling city of Changsha is a ruined city, full of coke rubble, and the whole city is filled with a scorching smell.
"I remember that at the mouth of Zhongshan Road, we saw that the granary there was burning, and it was still smoking, and the whole grain that was burned in the ground turned into white ash when we opened it, and there were dangerous walls and broken walls everywhere, and in some places, when we looked at the past, we couldn't see the edge, and it burned into a flat."
The city of Changsha was burned to the ground
To this day, people still have different opinions about the cause of the Wenxi fire, and the rumor that "the Japanese Kou has killed the Xinhe River near Changsha" is undoubtedly a key factor. On that night, shrouded in the clouds of war, the rumor fueled panic.
On the same day, the captain of the social training corps responsible for the ignition mission in the north city was having dinner with the team members in a restaurant. When he walked out of the store drunk, he found that the southern city was already a sea of fire, thinking that the order to set fire had been issued, and he was going to be charged with dereliction of duty, so he was scared to jump into the XiangJiang River.
As a result, there was no ignition in the North City.
The former site of the Eighth Route Army's Communications Office in Hunan Province
In 1938, the Eighth Route Army was stationed in The Communications Office of the Xiang Dynasty, located at No. 2 Shouxing Street near present-day Huangxing North Road in Changsha. It belongs to the industry of Sanyi Grain Stack.
On the night of the Wenxi fire, Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying were busy until the early hours of the morning before they lay down with their clothes. Early the next morning, it was necessary to evacuate to Hengshan, and many documents and equipment needed to be cleaned.
At about two o'clock, Zhou Enlai, who had just fallen asleep, suddenly heard the shouts of the guard Qiu Nanzhang.
In a letter to his wife, Deng Yingchao, Zhou Enlai described the situation at that time: "Last night Changsha was on fire, and the whole city was torched. ”
Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying were in Changsha
Zhou Enlai and the others moved to Xiangtan, and at this time, the ferry to Xiangtan was crowded with refugees who had escaped from the fire, and the scene was chaotic.
Zhou Enlai immediately commanded a group of staff of the Third Department to organize the evacuation and pacification work, and the order of the ferry port was slowly restored.
Early the next morning, Zhou Enlai, who had not slept all night, immediately sent a telegram to the four performance teams and the anti-Japanese propaganda team belonging to the Third Hall of the Political Department, instructing them to rush to Changsha to participate in the propaganda and pacification work after the fire.
After the fire was extinguished for five days and five nights, Zhou Enlai, Tian Han, and others led the anti-enemy performance team and nearly a hundred other personnel to return to Changsha in the first batch to carry out disaster relief and mobilization work.
Tian Han in his youth
Witnessing a scorched earth of Changsha, Tian Han wrote a poem at the first time of returning to the city, and handed it over to sing, the poem was called "Revisiting Changsha After the Disaster".
The long drive of dust and fog through Xiangtan, the country returned to bear with it.
The embers of the city have no lights to add darkness to the night, and the wild flames break the sky blue.
There are thousands of people with heavy burdens, and the whole tile is completed.
As if there is no grinding of xiongjie, and then build Hunan from scorched earth.
Set up the stage, the anti-enemy performance team quickly played a role. More citizens were organized, they began to provide disaster relief and self-help, more materials began to be transferred in, and publicity and pacification work was actively carried out.
Changsha tea house before the fire
A panoramic view of Changsha City before the fire
That night, Changsha was destroyed
On November 19, the first market appeared in Changsha after the fire, with 3 meat sellers and 2 vegetable sellers.
On November 20, vendors selling rice noodles and oil cakes appeared at the south gate and the north gate, respectively.
On November 21, the provincial post office began to set up mail receiving offices in the city and resumed postal services.
On November 22, the Grand West Gate began to set up an open-air shopping mall
On November 29, Changsha Railway Station resumed operations.
On November 30, the Provincial Telecommunications Bureau set up a reporting office in the northern suburbs of Changsha to open long-distance telephones in the province.
Refugees waiting to receive relief money
This photo was taken on December 9, 38, a month after the Wenxi fire, and was taken by Xiao Yue, a foreign teacher at Yale-Indy Middle School, in Changsha Education Huiping. The black-pressed crowd in the photo is a refugee who has come to receive relief money.
At that time, each disaster victim could receive a relief payment of 5 yuan and could buy 100 catties of rice, which was not a small amount at that time.
According to statistics, during the entire disaster relief period, the National Government and the Hunan Provincial Government successively distributed relief funds of 920,000 yuan and provided relief to 124,000 victims.
A scorched earth of Changsha City
On December 22, the Changsha Fire Temporary Relief Committee announced the end of its work. The scorched earth of Changsha slowly began to recover.
Subsequently, a large number of Changsha citizens returned to Changsha and began to rebuild their homes in a broken wall and ruin, and with rare tenacious will and courage, they insisted on resisting the war and supported the front line.
Pozi Street after being burned by fire
In the Wenxi fire, nearly 700 streets in Changsha were burned to pieces, and only a few houses remained in more than 500 streets. Dozens of schools, including Mingde Middle School and Zhounan Middle School, have become ruins.
The former residence of Jia Yi, which has a history of more than 2,000 years, was burned to the ground. The thousand-year-old famous building Dingwangtai, along with the 10,000 volumes of rare books and ancient books it treasured, was destroyed in the fire.
More than 250 rice factories in the city burned more than 1.9 million stones of grain and rice, and lost more than 10 million yuan of Silver Ocean. In the fire, all the Xiang embroidery villages, along with embroidery and paintings, survived.
The famous Jiangxi merchant Yu Taihuajin in Changsha, whose precious national treasure 440 Han seals, was melted into a copper discus along with the safe in the fire.
The ruins of the broken wall after the Wenxi fire
The Wenxi fire shocked the world, huge losses, disappeared cities, and the world remembered its name - Changsha.
People began to return home
Changsha issued an unyielding cry
However, Changsha is still there. It will stand up again, resolutely facing the next three great battles in the name of this place, and with victory, make its name known to the world again.
Although the Wenxi fire completely destroyed the ancient Changsha, it did not destroy the soul and blood, blood and fighting spirit of the city. After suffering great pain, the people of Changsha still issued an indomitable cry with stubbornness, just as Tian Han sang in the poem, "It is as if there is no grinding of xiongjie qi, and then build Hunan from scorched earth."
After the Wenxi fire, Changsha became the main battlefield of the Sino-Japanese army four times, and three of the battles ended in the defeat of the Japanese army, successfully blocking the Japanese army for five years, becoming one of the main frontal battlefields in the stage of the War of Resistance. Although Changsha was listed as one of the four most damaged cities in World War II, it was the only city to be reborn in the war.
At the Battle of Changsha, the Chinese army annihilated countless enemies
Tomorrow, @Fenghua Peerless Xiao'er will continue to tell the fourth article of using a Xiangzhuang River and Mountain - Blood and Fire Camp, relive history, do not forget the national shame, learn from history, and keep in mind the mission!