Zhuge Liang, courtesy name Marquis Zhongwu and one of the Ten Philosophers of the Wumiao Temple, said in the history books that he used his troops "to advance and retreat like the wind" and "the day the soldiers came out, the world shook". However, when the Second Northern Expedition attacked Chen Cang, he occupied a numerical superiority of tens of times, but lost to a man.
In December 228, Zhuge Liang set out with a large army and began his second Northern Expedition. Only a month ago, he had heard that Cao Xiu's 100,000-strong army had been defeated by Lu Xun at Shiting. Now Wei Bing was moving east, and Guanzhong was weak. Zhuge Liang took advantage of this time to make the Northern Expedition very clever, and he echoed with the Wu state from west to east, creating a lot of pressure on the Wei defense line. The first city he wanted to conquer on this trip was Chen Cang.
Chen Cang is not large in scale, but it is very famous in history. When Chu and Han were fighting for hegemony, Han Xin defeated Zhang Handan here and then occupied Guanzhong. Yuan Dynasty dramatists adapted this matter and became what we know today as "Ming Xiu Zhan Dao, Darkness Chen Cang". Chen Cang is located in The Key Chong, connecting Shudi and Guanzhong, and is a place that must be contested by successive generations of soldiers.
The Wei commander Cao Zhen expected Zhuge Liang to attack from here, so he sent a man, Hao Zhao. If you read the history books for the first time, most people will definitely not know who Hao Zhao is, and may think that he is just an unknown general. However, according to the historical records, when Zhuge Liang heard that Hao Zhao was guarding Chen Cang, Zhuge Liang's reaction was "great consternation", and it was not counted if others were shocked, but this was Zhuge Liang, what ability did this Hao Zhao have?
Speaking of Hao Zhao, some friends may not even have heard of the name, which cannot be blamed on everyone, because in the main history, Hao Zhao did not even have a decent biography, and his biography was only quoted in The Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms by Pei Songzhi, and the appendix was in the "Wei Shu Ming Emperor's Chronicle", and his deeds were only scattered sporadically in the biographies of others. Hao Zhao, a native of Taiyuan, Hezhou, was a majestic man who joined the army as a teenager and gradually became a general by relying on military merit, and has been guarding Hexi, which is today's western Gansu Province. During the Three Kingdoms period, Hexi belonged to the border area, where Qianghu lived in a mixed way, the people were fierce, and rebellions were frequent, which was a very difficult place to manage. So how did Hao Zhao manage this place? The history books record that he "guarded Hexi for more than ten years, and the people were afraid of obedience", and both The Han and Hu people were afraid of him and obeyed him. Hao Zhao's prestige was made, and he led his army to quell the rebellion many times and behead the leader of the rebel army. He is flexible in his use of troops, able to judge the hour and size up the situation, and does not stick to the orders of his superiors. When he was stationed in Jincheng, his superiors had orders not to cross the Yellow River to the west, but when the rebellion broke out and the crisis came, Hao Zhao listened to Su Ze's advice, decisively led his army to cross the Yellow River in the west, and took advantage of the rebels' unstable foothold to crush them in one fell swoop and quell the rebellion in Hexi.
Zhuge Liang did not expect that Hao Zhao had actually been transferred from the northwest to Chen Cang. He had also heard of Hao Zhao's prestige in the Western Regions, and he had a premonition that this siege might not be easy. As the saying goes, "attacking the heart is to attack the city from above and attacking the city to the bottom", in the face of Hao Zhao's hard bone, Zhuge Liang did not want to bite. He summoned one of Hao Zhao's compatriots, Jin Xiang, and asked him to persuade Hao Zhao to surrender, and Hao Zhao responded from the city tower, "You are familiar with the laws of the State of Wei, and you also know my personality." I am deeply favored by the country and the door is noble, it is impossible to surrender, you don't say it again, I will only die if I lose, you go back and tell Zhuge Liang, let him come and attack the city. Hao Zhao's words were very clear, and he directly said an important reason why he could not surrender: The State of Wei has laws, and I have a family.
Here we should mention the "pledge" system of the State of Wei, the "pledge" system began with Cao Cao, through Cao Pi and Cao Rui and gradually improved, the "pledge" system stipulates that the general who leads the army for many years, his family should stay in the interior as a hostage, if it is a general who guards the border pass, this hostage must also be his son. It's a reminder to the generals who are fighting on the front lines that if you want to defect and surrender, you have to think about your family first. For this reason, Hao Zhao could not surrender, and Jin Xiang could only go back to Zhuge Liang to resume his life. But Zhuge Liang was not yet dead-hearted, and he asked Jin Xiang to go again. From here, we can see that Zhuge Liang is really jealous of Hao Zhao, and if he changes individual generals, Zhuge Liang will directly attack with so much nonsense.
The second time he persuaded him to surrender, Zhuge Liang's words were very threatening, your soldiers and horses can't defeat us, you don't want to die in vain. Zhuge Liang did not scare Hao Zhao, the history books record that he had "tens of thousands", while Hao Zhao's soldiers only had "more than a thousand people", the so-called "ten sieges", these dozens of times the superiority of troops is more than enough to fight a siege battle. But Hao Zhao was not afraid at all, and his reply to Jin Xiang was: "I already said what I should have said last time, don't come again." I know you, but the bow and arrow don't know you", the words have already been said, and Zhuge Liang is also dead hearted. He thought that his troops were far more than Hao Zhao's, and it would take a while for Wei's rescue troops to arrive, so he gave an order to attack the city.
Zhuge Liang first used two siege weapons, the ladder and the rushing car. Speaking of ladders, people often ask the soldiers guarding the city why they didn't just push the ladder down. This is actually everyone being misled by the TV series. Many TV dramas have limited production costs and cannot restore the ancient ladder, so they directly use simple long ladders. The real ancient Yunqi is huge and thick, and we can see from this picture in the "General Outline of the Martial Classics" that the inside of the ladder can accommodate several people, there are wheels at the bottom, propelled by human beings, and there are iron hooks at the top of which can be fixed to the city wall. Once the ladder is erected, its angle, volume, weight and fixing method all determine that it cannot be easily pushed away. Along with the gathering, there were also the first dead soldiers who were not afraid of death, and once Zhuge Liang's soldiers were allowed to climb the city wall in large numbers, the defenders would not be far from defeat. Hao Zhao looked at the wooden ladder and came up with a way to attack with fire. He ordered his soldiers to fire the ladder with a rocket and burn it to death along with the soldiers on the ladder. This is the rocket's first appearance in the mainland's existing history books.
It's time to solve the punching point. The rushing car is a weapon specially used to attack the city gates, and it is also propelled by human power. It is equipped with a huge siege hammer that can be used by inertia to exert a huge impact, and the top is often equipped with a guard like an eaves to protect soldiers from arrows. What should I do if the bow and arrow are not pierced? Hao Zhao took local materials and found a stone mill from the city. Don't look at the stone mill, which can only be used to knead wheat into powder, it can also defend the city at critical moments. The stone grinding is hard, regular in shape and heavy in weight. Hao Zhao tied it with rope, aimed at it, and then threw it from the city wall, smashing Zhuge Liang's rushing car in one fell swoop. If the stone grinding is not broken, it can also be lifted up with a rope and reused.
This is not the first time that Hao Zhao has used local materials, he once dug a grave many times to obtain wood in order to make siege weapons, so he also felt that there was no one for the deceased, and before he died, he instructed his son to follow everything in the future.
Both the ladder and the rushing car were destroyed, and Zhuge Liang could only think of other ways. He ordered people to build a high well on the battlefield. The well is a movable wooden arrow tower. In siege warfare, defenders rely on towering walls, which can often form a long-range suppression of siege forces, and defenders stand higher and have a longer range of bows and arrows. Under the cover of the city walls, it is possible to shoot the siege soldiers from high above, and the siege soldiers want to shoot the defenders in the battlements from the bottom up, and the presence of the well is precisely to defuse this long-range advantage of the defenders. The height of the well is similar to the city wall, some even higher than the city wall, and there are wooden planks on the top and around the perimeter to protect the soldiers inside. The soldiers in the well can either calmly fire arrows at the defenders of the city, or they can reach the city wall relatively safely and directly enter the city.
Considering that Hao Zhaocai destroyed his own ladder with a rocket, Zhuge Liang did not use the well to climb the city, but used it to continuously fire arrows into the city, covering the soldiers to climb the city wall directly. The Shu army braved the rain of arrows, filled the trenches and climbed the city wall, after a bloody battle, it was not easy to climb the city but desperately found that Hao Zhao had built another city wall in the city, and the general design of the urn city broke the psychological defense line of the Shu army, which was the so-called "one drum and one blow, and then decline". The Shu army did not have the confidence to attack another city wall, and this operation also ended in failure.
Three failures caused Zhuge Liang to abandon his plan to attack from the ground, and he decided to dig tunnels to bypass the city wall directly, allowing his troops to suddenly kill from the city. This trick is very desperate, because you don't know where he will suddenly dig it out from, and Hao Zhao doesn't know either. So he simply dug a long horizontal tunnel in the city to intercept it. The intersection of the two tunnels was where the Shu Army's tunnels were cut off by the collapse, and Zhuge Liang failed again.
He has tens of times the superiority of troops, and has been fighting with Hao Zhao day and night for more than 20 days, but he has been unable to win, and finally left three words in the history books that make us stunned, "bright and uncountable." Zhuge Liang even had a time when his skills were poor. At this moment, the reinforcements of the State of Wei finally arrived, and Zhuge Liang had no choice but to retreat. The Second Northern Expedition thus came to an end.
In the three kingdoms era of heroes, Hao Zhao was not famous. On that day, Zhuge Liang personally led a large army in the Northern Expedition, which caused the Wei state to shake the court, and the Wei Ming Emperor Cao Rui said to Zhang Guo worriedly: "By the time you arrive, Zhuge Liang will probably already occupy Chen Cang." No one pinned their hopes on Hao Zhao, no one felt that he could win, after all, Zhuge Liang was too strong, Chen Cangcheng was too small, but under this small Chen Cangcheng, Hao Zhao stubbornly resisted Zhuge Liang's army. In more than twenty days of offensive and defensive duels, he saw tricks and tricks, made frequent strange plans, repelled the attacks of the Shu army again and again, and finally relied on his superior strategy to defeat the strong with the weak and the many with less, and single-handedly defeated Zhuge Liang's second Northern Expedition. After the war, Emperor Ming of Wei personally received Hao Zhao and said happily, "With such a general, what else do I have to worry about?" He created the Marquis of Guannei for Hao Zhaojia's official Jinjue. But unfortunately, Hao Zhao died of a serious illness soon after, and a generation of famous generals fell, but Chen Cang's battle, a moment of brilliance is enough to make future generations remember.