The long river of history is running endlessly, there are calm waves, there are also waves, let Xiaobian take you into history and understand history.
On July 7, 1937, the Japanese army invading China brazenly launched the "Lugou Bridge Incident", Japan began to invade China in an all-round way, and the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out. Not long after the war began, the few international lines of communication in our country were cut off one after another. In August 1938, the Burma Highway, built by 200,000 Chinese migrant workers, was opened to traffic, and almost all international aid to China entered China through the Burma Highway. At the end of 1941, the Pacific War broke out, and the Japanese army invaded Burma in an attempt to cut off the Burma Road.
In order to support the international allies fighting in Southeast Asia and ensure the smooth flow of the Burma Road, in March 1942, the Nationalist government sent 100,000 elite troops to burma to form an expeditionary force to join hands with the British and American allies to resist Japan. The Chinese Expeditionary Force fought bloodily and repeatedly defeated the enemy's front, dealing a heavy blow to the Japanese army. However, due to the poor cooperation of the Allied forces, the expeditionary force fought alone and fell into the heavy encirclement of the Japanese army, and the expeditionary force had to retreat in desperation.
Since the Japanese cut off the expeditionary force's return route, Du Yuming made a difficult decision: to cross the Savage Mountain to return home. On May 15, 1942, the expeditionary force blew up the jungle of the Savage Mountain in northern Burma, who knew that this seemingly ordinary retreat had become a "death retreat" that shocked the world. The expeditionary forces never imagined that the original forest of Savage Mountain was actually an extremely terrible "green devil's cave"! Things in the mountains are more poisonous than devils, and the way home is unexpectedly difficult and long.
A month later, the troops began to run out of food, and several fighters starved to death. Du Yuming had to kill more than 100 war horses for the supplies, so that the soldiers had a full meal. After the horses ran out, everyone began to eat shoes, belts, and even pistol holsters became their food. A warrior saw wild konjac growing by the river, and he dug up a small piece of it and licked it with his tongue, which immediately swelled up, and his tongue did not swell until 4 days later. Some warriors ate poisonous plants by mistake, rolling on the ground in pain and wailing incessantly, but because there was no medicine, everyone could only watch them being poisoned.
More than 10 days after entering the mountain, the rainy season in the tropical primeval jungle has arrived, and the jungle is full of ants. As the warriors walked on the road, these bloodthirsty demon kings waited on the leaves with their heads held high, and as soon as the human body touched the leaves, they took the opportunity to climb on the human body to suck blood. Burmese ants are particularly large, and it is said that a large ant can suck a pound of blood at a time! The mosquitoes of Savage Mountain were also surprisingly large, their wings spread almost like dragonflies, and the warriors were bitten all over the bag, red and swollen, and extremely itchy.
The dense forest will never be without poisonous snakes and wild beasts, and the deeper you go into the mountains, the more eerie and terrifying it becomes. Wild beasts run rampant, miasma rages, mosquito bites spread germs of all kinds, edema, regressive fever, malaria, tetanus, and strange diseases that are not known follow. Because of the lack of medical supplies, many soldiers were tortured, often walking, they would fall to the ground and never get up again, and the roadside and grass huts were piled with the corpses of the warriors, which would turn into white bones within hours under the blood of locusts, ant bites, and heavy rain.
Liu Guiying, a nurse at the Field Hospital of the 22nd Division of the Fifth Army of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, remembers that retreating from Savage Mountain was a path of death. "It's miserable. White bones are tired, corpses are flowing, maggots crawl everywhere, and the stench is smoky. Poor 5 sisters in our nurse class were the only ones who came out of Savage Mountain alive. Liu Guiying was weak, walked around and rested, and fell at the end of the line. But she didn't have to worry about getting lost, along the way, the route of the soldiers falling was the direction of returning home.
In the end, the Chinese Expeditionary Force went abroad with 100,000 people, more than 40,000 people left the battlefield alive, and only more than 3,000 people finally crossed the Savage Mountain to return to the border. Each of them puts their own life and death aside, and today's living and working in peace and contentment is inseparable from their efforts and sacrifices in those years, and we should remember them.
Well, today's sharing ends here, and we'll see you next time