Among the many units of the Kuomintang, the 71st Army is a very special name, its predecessor is the National Government Guard Army, which was responsible for the security of Nanjing, and was known as the "Jiang Family Royal Forest Army".
Although it is not listed among the five main forces of the Nationalist Army, the 71st Army also has brave soldiers and well-equipped soldiers. It is precisely because of this that it was able to resist the offensive of the Northeast Democratic Coalition Army in 1946.
The successive commanders of the 71st Army have produced several famous generals, such as Song Xilian, Zhong Bin, Chen Mingren, and so on, and the commander I want to talk about today is also a famous anti-Japanese general, and he did not support the Liberation War, but in the end he maintained his foolish loyalty to Chiang Kai-shek.
His name was Xiang Fengwu.
Xiang Fengwu was born in Longshan, Hunan in 1900, and was very courageous when he was a child. Longshan belonged to western Hunan Province, which was relatively poor at that time, and had a fierce local specialty- bandits.
When he was studying at BaojingLian Middle School, he once returned to his hometown just when the bandits had plundered his hometown, and Xiang Fengwu immediately gathered a group of young people to fight the bandits with earthen guns.
After the two sides encountered, Xiang Fengwu killed several bandits in front of him, and his fierceness made those who had robbed their homes afraid to defect. In the following years, no bandits in Xiang Fengwu's hometown dared to come to seek trouble.
After graduating from Baojing Lianhe Middle School, Xiang Fengwu first went to Wuhan, and then thought that studying was not as good as joining the army, so he went south to apply for the Whampoa Military Academy, and became a Huangpu IV student in 1926. Among his classmates, there are celebrities such as Lin Biao and Hu Lian.
In October of the same year, Xiang Fengwu graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy, and immediately became a platoon commander under the First Army to participate in the Northern Expedition, and was soon promoted to the company commander of the 1st Division for his military achievements.
It was also from this time that he had a relationship with the 71st Army, why did he say so?
Because the 1st Division was reorganized into the National Government Guard Division in 1930. It was expanded into the Guard Corps in 1931. When the Songhu Anti-Japanese War broke out in January 1932, in order to strengthen the defense of Shanghai, the Guard Army was reorganized into the 5th Army, and its two divisions were renamed the 87th Division and the 88th Division, and later a 36th Division was expanded.
After the outbreak of the All-out War of Resistance, these three divisions expanded into three corps, the 87th Division became the 71st Army, the 36th Division became the 78th Army, and the 88th Division became the 72nd Army. Although it was nominally expanded, its life was not replenished, and later because of the serious losses in the war, the 78th Army and the 72nd Army finally revoked their names and their troops were merged into the 71st Army.
Xiang Fengwu served in this system from the beginning of teaching the 1st Division, which was longer than any military commander.
After the outbreak of the All-out War of Resistance, Xiang Fengwu, then deputy brigade commander of the 261st Brigade of the 87th Division and commander of the 522nd Regiment, led his troops to participate in the Battle of Songhu, and after the fall of Shanghai, he led his troops back to Nanjing, and then participated in the defense of Nanjing.
On 8 December, the Japanese attacked Nanjing. The 522nd Regiment was defending the front line of the former engineering school outside Nanjing, and on the 9th it repelled the attack of the 16th Division of the Japanese Kou, who bombarded the positions of the 522nd Regiment with dense artillery on the 10th and attacked again on the 11th.
Although the construction site was destroyed, Xiang Fengwu led the troops to resist stubbornly, so that the Japanese Kou could not break through the position.
The 16th Division was a division of the Japanese Kou, but now the connection was defeated, and its division commander Nakajima Imasago was very annoyed and named to eat Xiang Fengwubu, and the Japanese Kou launched a more powerful attack.
In desperation, the isolated and helpless troops were transferred, and originally wanted to reach Jiangbei by boat through Shimonoseki, but all the ships were sunk, and Xiang Fengwu and others could not cross and had to retreat into the city of Nanjing.
They wanted to find a reunion of fraternal troops and make plans, but the city was full of Japanese, and as soon as they entered the city, they were surrounded by Japanese. Xiang Fengwu knew that the resistance at this time was only a senseless sacrifice, and he did not expect that Rikou would be so depressed later, so he signaled everyone to lay down their weapons with his eyes.
Xiang Fengwu was very clever, and in the process of retreating, he had already removed the uniform of the school officer and changed into the dress of ordinary soldiers, so Riko did not guess that he was an officer when he saw that he was very embarrassed, and asked him to be responsible for cooking on the fire.
One day, his cousin Peng Changming, who was captured with him, secretly obtained a door panel, and the two of them took advantage of the fact that the Japanese were not prepared, and carried the door panel across the Yangtze River, thus escaping the terrible massacre.
Xiang Fengwu, who was lucky enough to survive, went to find a large army at the first time, still took up his original post and actively resisted Japan, and later on several occasions he almost died.
In the Battle of Lanfeng in 1938, the 12th division of the Yudong Army against the 14th Division of the Japanese Kou, due to the ineffective escape of gui yongqing, Long Muhan and other people of the central army, chiang kai-shek ordered the explosion of the Yellow River embankment at the mouth of the garden in the northeast of Zhengzhou in order to prevent the Advance of the Japanese army.
As a result, the Japanese Kou still pursued closely, and Xiang Fengwu led the supplementary 522nd Regiment as a rearguard in order to cover the withdrawal of the large troops.
After the Japanese Kou caught up, the brigade commander Chen Yiding told Xiang Fengwu: If you can't stop the Japanese army, you can see the opportunity to act. In fact, this sentence is to tell Xiang Fengwu that the meaning is enough, there is no need to leave your life there. At that time, many national armies did this.
But Xiang Fengwu was determined to stay behind to stop the Japanese army, and he said bluntly: I have decided to repay the country with my death, and the position will be my grave.
Although most of the 522nd Regiment was a recruit, but seeing that the regimental commander had such courage, each of them was not afraid of death, and later they had to repel the attack of the Japanese Kou head-on, and then tore open a hole, and the troops retreated calmly.
This courage of Xiang Fengwu was greatly appreciated by Chiang Kai-shek, so he promoted him to brigade commander of the 261st Brigade after he participated in the defense of Wuhan, and in May 1939 he was again promoted to the commander of the 87th Division, and his former superior Chen Yiding became his deputy deputy commander of the 87th Division.
In August of the same year, Xiang Fengwu led his troops to participate in the Battle of Jinnan, and after 17 days of bitter resistance to the Japanese Kou in Yangcheng, he fought to the point of running out of ammunition and food, and he could only risk death to break through. In the process of rushing outward, he engaged in a white-knife battle with the Japanese Kou. After hacking several enemies to death, he was unfortunately provoked in the abdomen by TheRaku's bayonet, and his intestines were exposed.
Peng Changming, who was serving as a guard on the side, helped him stuff his intestines back into his stomach, tore his clothes into strips and strangled them vigorously, and finally Xiang Fengwu continued to command the troops to fight and retreat, and successfully broke through.
So many times the great difficulty does not die, his luck is really good, and he is really a man!
In June 1942, Xiang Fengwu was promoted to deputy commander of the 71st Army, and entered Burma with the Expeditionary Force, and soon the 71st Army attracted a new commander, Chen Mingren.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the 71st Army was transferred by Chiang Kai-shek to fight in the northeast, and later Chen Mingren was able to successfully defend Siping, which also had a great credit to Xiang Fengwu.
However, Xiang Fengwu's mentality has changed in successive years of conquest, and he is far less enthusiastic about the civil war than he is about fighting against Japan, and he often says to the people around him: Fighting devils is to save the country and the nation, it doesn't matter if I lose this life, what do you do now to fight your own people? Haven't the people suffered enough?
In particular, after Chen Mingren won the battle but was transferred back to Nanjing for no reason, and the 71st Army was completely destroyed under the leadership of the new army commander Liu Anqi, Xiang Fengwu was even more disgusted by the civil war.
In March 1948, the rebuilt 71st Army was headed by Xiang Fengwu, but he did not care much about the army at all, and he drew, wrote, and played mahjong every day in a depressed mood, protesting silently in his own way.
Some subordinates also advised him that it was better to simply revolt if he sank so deeply, but Xiang Fengwu still had deep feelings for Chiang Kai-shek and said that he could not betray the principal.
During the Liaoshen Campaign, the 71st Army was under the command of Liao Yaoxiang, who forced him to send troops to Fengwu, and in desperation, he had to take the 71st Army to Montenegro to attack the People's Liberation Army, but he had no fighting spirit, so he quickly returned with a big defeat.
Back at Liao Yaoxiang's place, he caught up with a meeting, at which Liao Yaoxiang scolded and said: Whoever fights passively again will definitely shoot him. In fact, he was scolding Xiang Fengwu without naming names, of course, Xiang Fengwu ignored Liao Yaoxiang.
Jinzhou was taken by the People's Liberation Army, and Montenegro was not defeated, and Liao Yaoxiang had to issue an order for the entire corps to retreat to Shenyang. Xiang Fengwu directly threw down his troops and ran away during the retreat, and later was captured by our soldiers in a cornfield, and without much interrogation, he confessed his identity.
However, Xiang Fengwu was reluctant to throw himself into our army, so he was sent to the Fushun War Criminals Management Center.
After that, Xiang Fengwu was depressed and reluctant to cooperate with the transformation, and finally died of illness in 1959 at the age of 59.
Xiang Fengwu's performance on the anti-Japanese battlefield was definitely a hero, even in the later Liberation War, he was not very willing to participate, but unfortunately in his heart, he always put his personal loyalty first, hey.