The boy is determined to protect the township pass, kill the enemy and restore it; bury his bones, why should he be sangzidi, and the blood stains the mountains and rivers Kunlun Pass.
The poem depicts the Battle of Kunlun Pass during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, in which the Chinese army suffered more than 14,000 casualties, the Fifth Army, the most elite unit of the Kuomintang, suffered more than 11,000 casualties, and the Japanese army suffered more than 5,000 casualties.
What caused the Kuomintang to seize Kunlun Pass at all costs? How did the Chinese army capture Kunlun Pass at the hands of well-equipped Japanese troops? How much impact did this war have on the War of Resistance Against Japan?
The Land of the Throat
Kunlun Pass itself has a very important strategic location, it is located in the transportation hub of the three provinces, connecting the traffic of Sichuan, Hunan and Guangzhou.
Kunlun Pass was a gateway between Sichuan and Hunan, and Japan had wanted to use Yichang and Wuhan as military bases to gather heavy troops to attack Changsha.
By taking Changsha, Hunan and Western Hunan will be divided into two, and if they cannot respond from the beginning to the end, they will be able to greatly deal a blow to the determination of the Chinese people to resist the war.
However, they still underestimated the National Government's determination to resist Japan. General Xue Yue, commander of the Ninth Theater, led all the soldiers to fight the Japanese army to the original assembly area with unyielding fighting spirit, and Changsha was even more untouched.
In this battle, the Chinese army transported Soviet weapons to the Ninth Theater of Operations through the Yunnan Burma Highway, updated the equipment of the two ace armies in the hands of General Xue Yue, and greatly enhanced the combat effectiveness.
Hunan and western Hunan are also famous fish and rice towns, Japan has been coveted for a long time, in addition, from the July 7 Incident to the eve of the Battle of Kunlun Pass, the War of Resistance Against Japan has passed three years, Japan's own economy, resources have been close to exhaustion.
In order to take Hunan, Sichuan, and other places as soon as possible and force Chiang Kai-shek's government to surrender as soon as possible, Japan decided to land from the sea, attack Guilin, Nanning and other areas in China, and then attack Kunlun Pass, and take Nanning as a base to attack Hunan through Kunlun Pass, attack Hunan from north to south, and capture Changsha Hengyang and other places.
The Nationalist Government clearly knew that once Guilin, Nanning, and other places fell and Kunlun Pass was captured, then the Ninth Theater of Operations was bound to suffer from the enemy.
In addition, Kunlun Pass is related to the Yunnan-Vietnam Highway and the Yunnan-Burma Highway, two international aid roads, once Kunlun Pass is lost, China can only fight alone, it is difficult to get international assistance.
Because there were many factions in the Kuomintang and they were not convinced of each other, chiang kai-shek also liked to play with power, so each unit basically fought for itself, and many avoided fighting in order to preserve their strength.
Therefore, the reason why the victory in the Battle of Kunlun Pass was difficult, in addition to the strength of the Japanese army, internal contradictions were also a major key.
At that time, the command system of the Chinese defensive line was extremely complex, and the main defense was the Gui army, and the commander was Bai Chongxi, the director of the Guilin Xingyuan.
Among them, Chiang Kai-shek hoped to use this battle to achieve the goal of depleting the Gui clan, so his own central army did not participate in the war at the first time, at the same time, Chiang Kai-shek also transferred Zhang Fakui to the Fourth Theater, as the commander of the Fourth Theater, responsible for commanding the Gui troops.
Bai Chongxi was naturally unwilling, so the Gui generals only obeyed Bai Chongxi's orders, and Zhang Fakui did not get the actual command.
In order to divide the troops, Chiang Kai-shek transferred many generals from other factions to serve in the Gui clan, and many of the former Gui generals found excuses to leave their posts, and the internal affairs of the troops were not decided for a while.
In order to expand his territory, Bai Chongxi sent a part of his army to Yangchun and Yangjiang, causing the Chinese army's defense line to be stretched to thousands of miles and without strategic depth.
The Chinese army needed to deal with the well-trained and well-equipped Japanese Fifth Division in this situation, and the Japanese army also had aircraft and warships involved in the battle.
From this point of view, the defeat of the Chinese army has become a foregone conclusion, why did the Japanese army still fold kunlun pass?
Nanning fell
This was the fiercest battle of the Kuomintang army! In mid-November 1939, the Japanese army assembled a division and a brigade to conduct a blitzkrieg operation under the cover of naval forces, suddenly attacked Qinzhou Bay and quickly landed.
Due to the confusion of pre-war command, the troops stationed in Qinzhou Bay were a newly formed unit with weak combat effectiveness and poor weapons and equipment, and collapsed after holding out for a day.
Subsequently, the Japanese army continued to attack Qinzhou, Fangcheng and other places, and occupied the nearby area on the 17th. Some of the troops were left to defend the city, and the rest of the troops went north to fight.
The 19th Division of the Forty-sixth Army of the National Revolutionary Army conducted an interception operation, and the division commander Huang Gu, fearing the enemy's cowardice, fled alone, causing the troops to be distracted and collapsed at the first touch.
Subsequently, a large number of mountain bandits and traitors led the way for the Japanese army, and the Japanese army advanced very quickly, reaching the vicinity of Nanning on the 22nd.
After learning of the Japanese landing, Chiang Kai-shek urgently summoned Bai Chongxi and ordered Bai Chongxi to return to Guilin to command the battle.
Bai Chongxi was afraid of ordering many doors, and the military orders were different, and demanded that Chiang Kai-shek hand over the entire military command to himself, and that he not have to report to Zhang Fakui, the commander of the Fourth Theater, and that he could act arbitrarily when necessary.
In order to preserve the two "lifelines" of the Yunnan-Vietnam Highway and the Yunnan-Burma Highway, Chiang Kai-shek immediately agreed to Bai Chongxi's request, and also assigned his family foundation, the Fifth Army, the ace of the National Revolutionary Army, to Bai Chongxi's command.
After Bai Chongxi was appointed, he immediately ordered the Fifth Army stationed in Hengyang to march to Guinan, and at the same time commanded the Gui army to assemble urgently and rush to the inevitable road of the Japanese army to carry out the blockade operation.
The next day, the Japanese Fifth Division attacked Nanning after a night of rest, the troops stationed in Nanning were afraid of battle and feared death, and retreated in violation of the order without authorization, when the Japanese army attacked the outskirts of Nanning, Nanning City was already an empty city, the peripheral troops desperately resisted, but unfortunately finally lost, the Japanese army on the 24th without bloodshed to capture Nanning.
The Japanese army advanced to Kunlun Pass, the Chinese army rushed to battle, under the fierce attack of the enemy's aircraft and artillery, the 600 regiments of the 200 division of the Chinese resistance force did not retreat, with the strength of one regiment to resist the crazy attack of the two japanese companies, after holding out for two days and two nights, the Chinese army was forced to retreat, hoping to fight again.
Although this battle did not stop the pace of the Japanese offensive, it bought valuable time for the subsequent strategic development. Under strong Japanese artillery fire, the Japanese occupied Kunlun Pass on December 4.
In order to prevent the Japanese army from advancing north and retake Kunlun Pass, a vital place of life and death, Chiang Kai-shek handed over the Fifth Army to Bai Chongxi's command, and appointed General Du Yuming, a graduate of the first phase of the Whampoa Military Academy and chiang kai-shek's fire brigade commander, as the commander of the Fifth Army.
Among them, the 200th Division under the jurisdiction of the Fifth Army was the first mechanized corps in China at that time, and the whole division was equipped with heavy firepower such as tanks, heavy howitzers, mortars, and special operations units such as reconnaissance communication battalions and flamethrower columns.
Originally Chiang Kai-shek's trump card, this unit could fight one-on-one with the Japanese army under the same conditions without falling behind.
At that time, the Chinese army was poorly equipped and the quality of the army was not high, so if it wanted to fight against the Japanese army, it needed a four-to-one numerical advantage to be able to fight, that is, it was necessary to concentrate the strength of 4 armies to fight with a division of the Japanese army.
Kunlun Blood Battle
This is a war about the pattern of resistance against Japan! On December 18, 1939, the Honorary First Division of the Fifth Army of the National Revolutionary Army, under the leadership of division commander Zheng Dongguo, launched an attack on Kunlun Pass, flanked by Gui troops to assist the attack.
The Chinese army's attack caught the Japanese by surprise, and after losing some of its positions, the Japanese organized a defensive line against the Chinese army's attack with the support of aircraft.
After receiving the attack on Kunlun Pass, the commander of the Japanese Fifth Division, Imamura, considered it to be a general attack, did not pay much attention to it, and considered sending an army from Nanning to attack the Chinese army. This miscalculation allowed the Chinese to retake Kunlun Pass.
Japan's Fifth Army is a veteran Japanese army, which once participated in the war against Russia and won victories, known as the "Steel Army".
The soldiers of this regiment are all from Kagoshima, the origin of Japan's Bushido, and they are tenacious in their will to fight and fierce in battle. After the Chinese army captured Kunlun Pass, the Japanese army reoccupied Kunlun Pass.
In order to solve the Chinese attack on Kunlun Pass, the Japanese army also sent the 42nd Wing, commanded by Wing Commander Masao Nakamura to support Kunlun Pass, and assisted in supporting Kunlun Pass from other directions, and for a time, the Chinese army fell into a disadvantage.
From December 20 to 30, the Chinese army stubbornly blocked the various reinforcements of the Japanese army. In the face of the Japanese army with air force support, the Chinese army was indomitable and fought against the Japanese aircraft artillery with its own flesh and blood. In order to win, the Japanese army also despicablely used poison gas bombs, causing heavy casualties to the Chinese army.
In successive battles, the Chinese army killed Japanese Major General Masao Nakamura. The Japanese butcher wrote in his diary before his death that he affirmed the Chinese army: in the Kunlun Pass battlefield, the "steel army" encountered an army that was more tenacious than the "steel army" to fight, so it was defeated.
During this period, the Japanese army, which was stubbornly resisting at Kunlun Pass, had no supplies and was forced to eat tree bark to fill its hunger.
After many days of fighting, the Japanese army put a group of low-level officers into the Kunlun Pass position to direct the remaining Japanese troops to resist. But before these officers landed, many of them had been sifted through by machine guns.
On December 30, Chinese troops reoccupied Kunlun Pass, and many Japanese soldiers committed suicide after learning of the defeat.
Subsequently, the Chinese army under the command of Bai Chongxi prepared to retake Nanning in one fell swoop, but Chiang Kai-shek was reluctant to put his ace army, the Fifth Army, on the battlefield again.
The leaders of the various factions saw Chiang Kai-shek's attitude and were unwilling to throw their troops into cannon fodder, so the plan was forced to terminate.
Subsequently, Zhang Fakui, commander of the Fourth Theater, said that there was no point in re-attacking Nanning, and the entire campaign was over.
The battle of Kunlun Pass had a very far-reaching impact on the entire War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which thwarted the Japanese army's attempt to "kill China in World War I" and greatly boosted the anti-Japanese confidence of the Chinese people.
Secondly, although the Chinese army suffered huge casualties, and Chiang Kai-shek's ace Fifth Army was almost destroyed, it also greatly depleted the effective strength of the Japanese army, making it impossible for the Japanese army to carry out large-scale operations due to insufficient troop resources, and the War of Resistance Against Japan entered a stalemate stage.
Under the command of the Kuomintang, although there were many problems in the Chinese army, the Chinese servicemen still showed the indomitable spirit of the Chinese nation and the bloodiness of the Chinese soldiers in the face of national hatred and family hatred.
Thank you to those predecessors who sacrificed their lives to resist aggression and defend their homeland, you have bought a better tomorrow for China.
Thank you to those who have inherited the will of your predecessors, it is precisely because you are wearing military uniforms that you have protected the lights of this Chinese family.
Blood-colored remnants of Kunlun Pass, millions of heroic souls stationed in the world; the country is rich and the people are strong, and they are dressed in military uniforms to protect national security.