The Battle of Henan, which took place in 1944, was the first phase of the Yuxianggui Campaign, which the Japanese army launched to open up the mainland communication line. The main purpose of the Japanese army in the Henan battlefield was to open up the Beijing-Han Line. To this end, the Japanese mobilized 148,000 elite troops plus 691 armored tanks to participate in the operation. Our army has gathered 300,000 troops in the Henan region for defense.
The top brass responded passively, and Henan was defeated
The main reason why the Japanese were eager to open up the mainland communication line was that the defeat in the Pacific Theater made it necessary for them to solve the Allied airfields in China as soon as possible. Otherwise, the U.S. military could rely on Airfields in China to bomb the Japanese mainland at any time. The mainland also saw that Japan was already at the end of the crossbow, and failure was doomed. Therefore, the idea of "waiting for victory" is widespread at the top of our army. also
It was precisely this negative idea of "waiting for victory" that made our army's officers and men less heroic than they had in the past in fighting the Japanese army in the Battle of Henan.
The Battle of Henan lasted only more than 30 days, 300,000 elites were defeated, a large part of Henan's territory fell, and the Japanese Operation No. 1 ended in a nearly perfect situation. However, a tragic scene also emerged on the battlefield in Henan. Among them, the Xuchang Defense War played out the bloodiness that Chinese soldiers should have.
The fierce defense of Xuchang
Xuchang was an important town in Hebei, and Cao Wei once established the capital here during the Three Kingdoms period. The Japanese army originally thought that such a military town on the mainland would have a heavy army group for defense. In order to successfully take the important town of Xuchang, the Japanese army mobilized 80,000 elite troops to march to Xuchang. To the surprise of the Japanese army, Jiang Dingwen, the commander of the mainland in charge of the Henan campaign, actively fought among themselves and was unwilling to support Xuchang. Therefore, when the elite of the 80,000 Japanese army approached Xuchang, Xuchang, a thousand-year-old military town, was garrisoned only by the newly organized Twenty-ninth Division led by Lü Gongliang.
However, the nearby Tang Enbo's Eighty-seventh Army never dared to enter Xuchang to join the newly formed Twenty-ninth Division and garrison Xuchang.
In the face of absolute inferiority, the mainland's top brass disregarded the huge gap between the enemy and us and issued an extremely unreasonable order, that is, to stick to Xuchang. And my new Twenty-ninth Division did not complain after receiving the order, and they were ready to defend the city alone and coexist and die with the city.
On April 28, 1994, the 80,000 elites of the Japanese army launched a fierce attack from the north of Xuchang City to the Xuchang garrison. The officers and men of our army resisted bravely, and the battlefield was full of soldiers who died in battle. Under the stubborn resistance of our army, the Japanese army was never able to break through our army's defenses from the north. So they took advantage of their numerical superiority to attack our positions from all other quarters.
The war lasted until May 1, when Xuchang City was breached by the Japanese army in the south and west in the face of the absolute superiority of the Japanese army, and our army could only engage in street battles with the Japanese army.
Before the Battle of Xuchang,
General Lü Gongliang had long been prepared to die in battle, and he had already written a suicide note
。 The reason why the newly organized Twenty-ninth Division of the Xuchang Defense War was able to fight so firmly was related to General Lü Gongliang's spirit of treating death as a homecoming. Under his leadership, the officers and men of the newly compiled Twenty-ninth Division played the bloody nature of Chinese soldiers, and they wrote a sad song on the battlefield of Henan with the fierce defense of Xuchang in a deadly battle. In the end, General Lü Gongliang died heroically on the battlefield, and he was posthumously awarded the title of general of the army.
The fiasco on the Henan battlefield was inseparable from the negative anti-war ideas of Jiang Dingwen, commander of the First Theater, and Tang Enbo, deputy commander. Afterwards, both of them were held accountable and removed from their posts. However, this has been unable to recover the fact that the Beijing-Hankou railway communication line was opened by the Japanese army for a short time.
It took the Japanese army just over a month to complete the first phase of Operation One
。 Their next goal was to open up the southwestern mainland communication line.