The Battle of Changsha, commanded by the famous anti-Japanese general Xue Yue, created his own heavenly furnace tactics, annihilated 100,000 pure Japanese troops in three Changsha battles, Xue Yue enjoyed a hundred years of life because he annihilated too many Japanese troops, and died at the age of 103 in 1998.
However, the Seventy-fourth Army, known as the division of the "Tiger Ben" in the Battle of Changsha, broke the sand in the Chunhua Mountains on the outskirts of Changsha, and the commander Wang Yaowu almost died in martyrdom.
On the afternoon of September 18, 1941, Wang Yaowu suddenly received a telegram from Xue Yue, commander of the Ninth Theater, asking the Seventy-fourth Army to march to Hunan as quickly as possible to cope with the Japanese army's large-scale attack on Changsha.
The Seventy-fourth Army has been stationed in Jiangxi for a long time, and tens of thousands of people and horses must immediately assemble to move away to Hunan. The degree of mechanization of the Chinese army is very low, and the weight of the troops depends entirely on the people's husbands. After two days of hasty preparations, the Seventy-fourth Army was not able to advance until September 21, when the troops were able to advance, and the whole army marched in three groups to Liuyang via the Xianggan border.
The Seventy-fourth Army had just moved toward Hunan, and Xue Yue's telegram to the commander Wang Yaowu was intercepted by the Japanese Eleventh Army, and the new commander, Anan, was overjoyed and decided to eat the ace unit of the Seventy-fourth Army with heavy troops.
The number of the Seventy-fourth Army appeared frequently in the Japanese battle plans, orders, and diary of Anan, and the huge Seventy-fourth Army in motion was under the close surveillance of the headquarters of the Japanese Eleventh Army.
The Seventy-fourth Army marched to the Liuyang Jiaoxi Ridge area, was discovered by the Japanese reconnaissance planes, Anan only ordered the Japanese planes to strafe and bomb the infantry column of the Seventy-fourth Army, and a large number of Japanese planes swarmed over the marching column of the Seventy-fourth Army. The Chinese army, which has no air supremacy, is only passively beaten and helpless against the planes roaring through the sky.
The Japanese of the Seventy-fourth Army suffered heavy losses in the air raids, and the chain of command was disrupted. Before entering the battle, it lost its vigor, and the Seventy-fourth Army was enveloped by an ominous sign, but the troops still did not dare to pause, and by the morning of September 25, the whole army finally reached Liuyang City.
Before he could catch his breath, the commander Wang Yaowu received an urgent telegram from Xue Yue, asking the Seventy-fourth Army to rush to Huanghua Town, east of Changsha, and occupy a position along the south bank of the Laodao River along the line of Huanghua Town and Yong'an Town to defend the outskirts of Changsha.
Wang Yaowu did not dare to be idle, and at noon on September 25, the first unit of the Fifty-seventh Division seized Mount Chunhua, about nine kilometers from the town of Huanghua, at the speed of a rapid march, and the rest of the division arrived at dawn the next day.
The terrain of northern Hunan is the same as that of northern Jiangsu, dominated by mountains and lakes and swamps, and the Ninth Theater of Operations will completely destroy roads in every battle, making mechanized and motorized arms basically useless, and only cavalry is left to improve the speed of movement of the Japanese army.
In the Battle of Northern Hunan Province, the Japanese cavalry gave full play to its role in long-range raids. During the battle against the Tenth Army belonging to the Chinese Ninth Theater, the cavalry wing of the Japanese Eleventh Army took the rugged trail to launch a night attack on the front battalion of the Tenth Reserve Division of the Chinese Tenth Army.
The officers and men of the battalion were careless and were sleeping soundly in the barracks, when the Japanese cavalry suddenly broke in on horseback, charged and slashed and slashed, killing and wounding two or three hundred people overnight, making the reserve tenth division chaotic.
It was the brigade of Japanese cavalry that sneaked into Huanghua Town. At that time, Wang Yaowu was discussing the retreat with Lieutenant General Shen Jiucheng, who was sent by the commander of the theater to contact, and was not alert to the rapid surprise attack of the Japanese cavalry. The troops directly under the army were immediately scattered, and seeing the Japanese army approaching, Wang Yaowu hurriedly went into the woods along the side of the road with Shen Jiucheng.
Wang Yaowu's guard platoon gave up his order to cover, the guard platoon leader was killed by the Japanese cavalry with a saber, and Wang Yaowu himself was only a few steps away from being discovered by the Japanese army, because it was already dark at that time, he luckily escaped from danger, and the whole process was thrilling.
The night was overcast and dark, and there were pros and cons for the breakouts, the biggest disadvantage of which was not knowing the direction and not knowing which correct path to find to retreat. After the headquarters of the Fifty-first Division was dispersed, Li Tianxia and his staff were forced to break through separately.
In this total rout of the Seventy-fourth Army, the Fifty-first Division was in a fairly good position, with most regimental, battalion, and company commanders in control of one or more units in the confusion, and all of them brought their troops back. The most complete of these was the artillery battalion, and the deputy battalion commander Liu Bingjun returned to find the companies and fired at the pursuing enemy with heavy artillery fire.
The Japanese did not dare to bite and chase under the condition of ignorance, so that the artillery battalion returned safely without any loss. After the war, Wang Yaowu went to the Fifty-first Division to speak, and publicly praised Liu Bingjun for being able to be unfazed in the face of a strong enemy, and his wit and bravery, and he was specially promoted to the commander of the artillery battalion of the Fifty-eighth Division.
Of the three divisions, the fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth divisions suffered the greatest losses. The Fifty-seventh Division suffered forty percent of the casualties, and the Fifty-eighth Division suffered even more severe damage, with eighty-five officers killed and one hundred and forty-eight wounded and missing, with a total casualty rate close to half of the officers and men involved in the battle.
Chunhua Mountain was one of the few defeats in the history of the Seventy-fourth Army. Despite their defeat and retreat, they still showed the true colors of an elite division. After the battle, Chiang Kai-shek personally presided over a high-level military conference in Nanyue, at which Xue Yue was severely criticized for his command errors.
Although the Seventy-fourth Army suffered defeat, its performance was still affirmed, and the Fifty-first Division and the Fifty-eighth Division were each rewarded with 15,000 yuan in French tender, and Wang Yaowu and his two subordinate division commanders, Yu Chengwan and Li Tianxia, were awarded the Baoding Medal, and at that time the Medal of the Kuomintang army was divided into four kinds, and the Baoding Medal was second only to the Order of the Blue Sky and White Sun.
