Grenades thrown far enough, misfired their own personnel while charging, and ambushing enemy cars that don't know whether to hit the driver or the tires first seem to be "worthless", but they have really happened. The real battlefield will not be like the bridge section in the film and television drama, because there will always be accidents. When General Su Yu was still in the New Fourth Army, such a situation occurred from time to time.
After the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japan, the guerrillas led by Su Yu were incorporated into the second detachment of the New Fourth Army. Subsequently, the New Fourth Army ordered the second detachment and the first detachment (With Chen Yi as commander) to each dispatch a total of 4 companies to advance to southern Jiangsu (Su Yu as commander-in-chief) to cooperate with the frontal battlefield of the Third Theater.
Gu Zhutong assigned the task to the advance team to break the road and harass, but Su Yu did not want to fight like this all the time. Since Nanjing and Xuzhou fell one after another, the entire anti-Japanese army and people were in a pessimistic mood. Hundreds of thousands of national troops are constantly retreating, so what role can such a backward and weak "guerrilla force" play?
In the middle was Gu Zhutong, then commander of the Third Theater
Su Yu decided to fight a few battles with the Japanese in real swords and guns, which could not only gain the trust of the masses, but also exercise the actual combat skills of the advance team, who were already very unfamiliar with regular warfare. Before the start of the War of Resistance, Su Yu's troops experienced three years of guerrilla warfare, and there were not many old Red Army soldiers left in the former Red Seventh Army and Red Tenth Army who were good at field warfare.
In the area of Weigang, Zhenjiang, there was often a convoy of materials transported by the Japanese Third Division, and Su Yu was ready to ambush this convoy. Before the battle began, there was a question that bothered everyone: how to fight the devil's car?
The advance team had never fought a mechanized unit before, and some even saw a car for the first time.
Hit the driver first or hit the tire first? Because of this problem, the advance team even held a "Zhuge Liang meeting", and finally Su Yu made a decision: to hit the tire (it is likely that more than one Japanese soldier will drive a car).
It is difficult for our descendants to imagine that the soldiers of the New Fourth Army would have bothered with such "small problems", but this was the current situation at that time. Therefore, the real battlefield is rarely like the bridge section where the fuel tank is blown up by a shot in the movie and television drama: the soldiers have no idea where the fuel tank of the car is.
Have you decided on the tires of the car first, is there any other problem? Something more "unexpected" happened again.
When Su Yu's deployment was not complete, the Japanese convoy (a total of 5 vehicles) had entered the ambush circle, and the advance team could only attack in advance. Because the fight was too hasty, the machine gun squad responsible for shooting the tires did not hit the target.
The skills of the bomb throwing team are also generally lacking, and after many grenades are thrown, they explode more than ten meters away from the convoy.
Fortunately, the first car stopped after being hit by a cylinder in a panic, which also blocked the way forward.
According to the original plan, the advance team launched a charge to carry out a white-knife battle.
Perhaps for the first time against the Japanese, or perhaps it had been too long since to fight such a regular battle, a soldier was hit by his own men in the course of the charge.
The entire Weigang ambush took only half an hour, and the advance team killed 13 soldiers, wounded more than 10 people, and captured more than 10 Type 38 rifles.
In the eyes of posterity, this is simply a battle that is not worth mentioning, but in Su Yu's view, it is extraordinary. The "poor" have to live a "poor life" and slowly accumulate strength. For a battle like Wei gang, we must not only fight, but also fight more. Even if it only kills one ghost, capture a rifle. In addition, through this battle, the soldiers found confidence: even with inferior weapons, the New Fourth Army had the possibility of defeating the Japanese army.
For the victory, Su Yu kept a clear head. This ambush was only a convoy of transports, not a regular field force of the Japanese army, but the advance team still encountered a lot of trouble. When the battle began, the soldiers of the last Japanese car began to build positions for counterattack (not within the effective range of the advance team). The combat quality of these officers and men was very high, not only the shooting technique was accurate, but the artillery was also very skillful, and once suppressed the offensive of the advance team. Through the documents later captured, Su Yu learned that this was the Fifth Brigade of Japanese Field Heavy Artillery, nor was it infantry in the full sense.
In a real battle, there are bound to be some unknowns. Problems such as inaccurate bomb dropping, accidental injury to team members, and not knowing how to hit a car may appear in many units, which requires commanders to summarize, practice, and summarize again... The scale and influence of the Weigang ambush were simply not comparable to the seven battles and seven victories, the liberation of Jinan, and the Huaihai campaign commanded by Su Yu later. But which commander did not grow up from "accidents" and summaries again and again?