When it comes to the first meritorious servant of the taiping heavenly kingdom that perished, I am afraid that it is zeng wenzheng, Zeng Guofan. According to the orders of the imperial court, he selected and trained the Xiang army in his hometown and became the most fearsome enemy of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. Although Zeng Guofan was good at training troops and employing people, he was not good at commanding in front of the battlefield. If you come to the battlefield in person, you will always lose. In the Battle of Hukou, Zeng Guofan was beaten badly by Shi Dakai and prepared to commit suicide by throwing himself into the lake many times.
Zeng Guofan invented a stupid tactic, easily suppressed the Taiping Army, and after the European Society, killed 10 million people
In the end, Zeng Guofan, who was good at introspection, decided to leave the front-line combat command and was mainly responsible for strategy formulation. After his painstaking contemplation, he finally formulated a magic method to defeat the enemy.
At that time, the reason why the Tianping Heavenly Kingdom had so much momentum was because the Taiping Army was brave and good at fighting, especially good at hand-to-hand combat. The Eight Banner Army and the Green Camp Army have long been decayed, greedy and afraid of death. They only dare to fire, shoot, and shoot arrows at a distance, but they dare not engage in hand-to-hand combat. In trench warfare, the Taiping Army often braved the rain of bullets and bullets to rush to the Qing army, and then defeated it with white-knife warfare. The Taiping Army's white-knife warfare was so strong that even the Xiang Army was not an opponent. Therefore, in the early stage of the battle, Zeng Guofan would be beaten by the Taiping Army to jump into the lake.
In view of the superiority of the Taiping Army, Zeng Guofan summed up a tactic of "stiffening the village and fighting a stupid battle". The so-called "hardened village" means to build bunkers, trenches, and other fortifications to encroach on the territory of the Taiping Army step by step; the so-called "fighting a stupid battle" means to rely on the fortifications to resist and deplete the strength of the Taiping Army, and at the same time to seek to cut off the enemy's grain routes and ultimately achieve the goal of killing the opponent.
Compared with the Taiping Army, the Qing army was more fierce in firepower and the food supply was more stable. In the previous battles, the Qing army fought against the Taiping Army in the unobstructed field, unable to play the advantage of firearms. In the strong fortifications, the advantages of the Taiping Army's strong impact can be wiped out.
In the specific battles, the Xiang Army became a semi-engineered force, and they constantly dug trenches, built fortresses, and pressed forward to the Tianjing City. Zeng Guofan's style of play made the Taiping Army extremely uncomfortable. Although they were as brave as before, their flesh and blood could not match the trenches and muskets. Therefore, the Xiang army was always able to defeat the superior Taiping Army with inferior troops.
In the Battle of Anqing, the Xiang Army carried forward their usual characteristics of being good at fighting "stupid battles". They dug trenches and surrounded Anqing step by step, and even the local landscape was changed by them. Since Anqing was the gateway to Tianjing, the Taiping Army continued to pour troops into the area. But in the face of the strong fortifications of the Xiang Army, these reinforcements could not play any role at all.
In the end, the Xiang army began to besiege Tianjing, and they repeated the same trick, encircling the city with trenches, so that Tianjing was completely reduced to an isolated city. In the end, the Xiang army dug tunnels and blew up the walls of Tianjing City with explosives, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom eventually perished.
Although Zeng Guofan is known as "fighting a stupid battle", in fact, he has consciously or unconsciously found the lifeblood of the post-firearm era, that is, "defense is far stronger than attack". In that era, although firearms had developed to new heights, it was still difficult to destroy strong fortifications, especially trenches. In the era without tanks, "trenches + firearms" equaled invincible, difficult to break.
At that time, although China was a backward country, this way of "forging a hard village and fighting a stupid battle" was learned by the Westerners. Take the Englishman Gordon as an example, he participated in the war to pacify the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and fully saw the tactics of Zeng Guofan. He then left China to serve as governor of Sudan. In the face of the fierce Sudanese nomadic cavalry, Gordon also used "trench tactics". What's more, he also used machine guns to turn the war into a massacre.
In the period of the First World War, "hardening the village and fighting a stupid battle" finally shined. The two warring sides formed a three-dimensional defense with "barbed wire + trench + artillery" and became an impenetrable barrier. In that era, any offensive would have turned into a one-sided slaughter. At the Battle of the Somme, the British forcibly attacked German positions, resulting in the loss of 60,000 men in a single day under machine gun and artillery attacks. Later, in the French Offensive of Nivelle, the French were killed by germany in just nine days.
In the end, the First World War became a very large "dumb battle". Due to the strength of the Allies, germany was eventually dragged to death, just as the Qing Dynasty dragged down the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. In this "stupid battle", more than 10 million soldiers on both sides died in battle, setting a world record at the time.