He directly commanded the Huayuankou embankment (embankment digging) project, and after he prostrated three times at the Guandi Temple, tens of millions of people were displaced and 890,000 people were killed.
He is Xiong Xianyu. In June 1938, he directly commanded the Garden Mouth Embankment (Excavation Embankment) project.
On June 3, 1938, after the Japanese army took Lanfeng, it directly approached the city of Kaifeng, and the Longhai Line and the Pinghan Line were in turmoil, and Zhengzhou (County) was in danger.
If Zheng County is lost and central China is basically in no danger to defend, then the Japanese army will march to the Wuhan area in the next step, and the consequences will be very serious. After thinking about it, Chiang Kai-shek decided to break (dig) the levee and release the river water to create a ground obstacle in order to stop and delay the Japanese attack and buy time for our army to maneuver.
Chiang Kai-shek entrusted the task of breaking the embankment to the Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief of the First Theater of Operations to organize and implement it. The commander of the First Theater of Operations entrusted the task of digging the embankment to the 20th Army under the command of Shang Zhen. Shang Zhen ordered Jiang Zaizhen of the newly organized 8th Division of the 39th Army to take on the task of breaking the embankment.
Jiang Zaizhen decided that Xiong Xianyu, operational staff officer of the New 8th Division, would preside over the embankment breaking project.
After on-the-spot investigation, Xiong Xianyu selected the vicinity of the walnut orchard near the West Walnut Garden of the Guandi Temple at the mouth of the ferry garden on the south bank of the Yellow River in the northern suburbs of Zhengzhou (County), and then selected to execute the embankment about 300 meters west of the Guandi Temple.
After inspecting the walnut orchard near the West Walnut Garden of the Guandi Temple in Huayuankou, Xiong Xianyu chose to execute the embankment about 300 meters west of the Guandi Temple.
Before the garden mouth broke the embankment, Xiong Xianyu, Huang Yingqing, Ma Yingyuan, Su Guanjun, Zhang Guohong and others came to the Guandi Temple and reverently bowed to Guan Yunchang to pay homage to the incense.
Xiong Xianyu knelt on the ground, prostrated his head three times, and prayed: "Old Master Guan, the Chinese nation is currently suffering great difficulties, and it has been bullied and insulted by devils. We couldn't beat the Japanese, so we had no choice but to let the Yellow River flood them here. If you drown the people, you have to forgive us. ”
Su Guanjun was well aware of the consequences of the disaster of breaking the embankment here, and his eyes were sluggish, shouting: "How many people are going to die... How many people are going to die..."
"Dead people are for sure, and breaking the embankment here will greatly reduce the number of dead people." Xiong Xianyu raised his voice. Su Champion could only nod in agreement. Huang Yingqingsheng, commander of the engineer battalion, fell to his knees and burst into tears.
On June 7, Xiong Xianyu led more than 2,000 officers and men to kneel on the embankment of the Yellow River, and after prostrating themselves to the rough yellow river in great pain, the action of breaking the embankment began immediately.
First manual excavation, and then flat firing with cannons. Seventy shells fired in a row.
After two days and nights of hard fighting, officers, soldiers, and migrant workers, at 8:00 a.m. on June 9, The Garden Mouth successfully broke the embankment and released water. At the moment of releasing the water, more than 2,000 officers and men who broke the embankment burst into tears, and they were tragic and miserable.
At the beginning, the water velocity of the Yellow River at the breakage was very small, and by about one o'clock in the afternoon, the water was suddenly fierce, like a thousand horses galloping. The breach was also rapidly enlarged by the water potential, and a vast ocean was looking out.
A day after the breach, suddenly heavy rain fell, and the water of the Yellow River at the mouth of the breach was like a roaring dragon, tumbling down from the breach, forming a huge gap of 1460 meters at its largest.
After the breach of the embankment, Chiang Kai-shek declared that it was the Japanese who threw bombs from planes to blow up the embankment at the mouth of the garden.
After the Huayuankou embankment was broken, the Japanese army that relied on mechanized military equipment to attack the Longhai Line and the Pinghan Line was forced to change its original strategy of moving west along the railway line to the south. The number of Japanese soldiers killed in the flood reached as many as 7,452.
While the Yellow River flooded the Japanese Kou, it also affected 44 counties in Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. Tens of thousands of square kilometers of land became a water country.
According to figures provided by the "Damage and Aftermath Relief in the Yellow Pan Area", after the huayuankou embankment broke, 12.5 million people were displaced and displaced in dozens of counties in several provinces, and about 890,000 innocent people were killed.