Cao Cao in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" has two of the most embarrassing scenes, the first time is huarong Dao meets Guan Yu, whispering a breath to get a way to live, and the second time is forced by Ma Chao to cut off his beard and abandon his robe, losing face.
Everyone only remembered Cao Cao's embarrassment, but forgot that in the confrontation with Ma Chao, Cao Cao finally defeated Ma Chao and pacified Guan Long. In the face of the world-famous Western Liang Iron Horse, Cao Cao took advantage of the enemy's unstable foothold to carry out a sudden split attack with rapid mobile troops, and Ma Chao was caught off guard and was almost completely annihilated.
More than a hundred years ago, Caesar, the Roman Emperor who was far away in the west, led an army on the eighth expedition to Gaul, and almost used the same tactics as Cao Cao to completely annihilate the Gaulish rebel army Vicintoli in Alesia.
As the representative figures of the Two Heroes of the East and the West around the 1st century AD, Cao Cao and Caesar have too many similarities compared to each other. If the two of them knew each other, there would be a kind of pity for each other.
At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, when the world was in chaos, Cao Cao looked for the opportunity, accumulated grain, slowly became king, and blackmailed the princes of Tianzi, and almost used thunderous means to sweep away all the powerful forces in the north and unify the north.
Similarly, when Rome fell into civil strife, Caesar saw the various ills of the original republican system, abandoned the old system, fought in the south and the north, and braved the world to establish a new Roman empire.
In the military, it is even more talented. Cao Cao continuously destroyed Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu, Lü Bu, Liu Biao, Ma Chao, Han Sui and other separatist forces internally, repelled the Xiongnu, Wuhuan, Xianbei and other nomadic tribes externally, and became kings in hundreds of battles;
Caesar unified Rome, conquered Gaul, Iberia, and the Germans, defeated Egypt twice in a row, and expanded the Roman Empire to the entire Mediterranean coast, reaching the pinnacle of European power.
So, if Cao Cao, who is good at being a master of "military anatomy", meets Caesar, an expert in "surgery", what kind of spark will collide between the two? Who will win?
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="9" > Cao Cao and his military anatomy</h1>
China's greatest military work, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, has clouds:
This means that if one's own strength is ten times that of the enemy, one must besiege; five times one must adopt the tactic of group fighting and attack in one breath; if one times, one must divide the blows and break through each one; when the strength of the troops is almost the same, one must be good at fighting a stalemate; of course, if the strength of the troops is not as large as the enemy, it is natural to go to the top.
In short, the primary purpose of war is always to annihilate the enemy's living forces and preserve their own strength as the main goal.
This principle of war in Sun Tzu's Art of War, which "distinguishes war tactics by military strength," has become an unchanging battlefield rule that China has followed for thousands of years. Of course, Bai Qi, Xiang Yu, Han Xin, Li Shimin, and Lin Su, the six unborn wizards, are not within the scope of this discussion.
On this basis, Cao Cao brought this tactical method of splitting and breaking down in sun tzu's Art of War to the extreme, which can be said to be the prototype of the use of soldiers by later generations of great men: using high-speed movement warfare and geographical depth, grasping the initiative of the battlefield, holding the enemy's nose, and thus crushing the enemy piece by piece like cutting tofu blocks.
Take the Battle of Tongguan, for example.
The Battle of Tongguan actually stemmed from a strategic mistake by Cao Cao. After the Battle of Chibi, Liu Bei occupied Jingzhou, and the situation of the three divisions of the world was initially formed, and Cao Cao saw that the south was difficult for a while, so he thought of a roundabout battle, first solving Zhang Lu in Hanzhong, and then breaking Liu Zhang of Yizhou, forming a strategic encirclement of Jingzhou.
However, the wise man must have a mistake, and Cao Cao took into account all aspects, except for the Western Liang warlords who occupied Guanlong. Seeing that Cao Cao had no time to take care of the northwest, Xi Liang Ma Chao joined forces with Han Sui and started an army rebellion, and Cao Cao was forced to shift his spearhead and aim his gun at Ma Chao, thus giving Liu Bei a chance to breathe and sit up.
In the sixteenth year of Jian'an, Cao Cao personally conquered Xiliang. In the face of the Tongguan Natural Danger, Cao Cao posed a situation in which the large army was pressed, but he made a clear plan, secretly Chen Cang, and sent Xu Huang to lead 4,000 people to cross the Yellow River in the north, bypassing the Tongguan Heavenly Danger, defeating The Western LiangXing and others to help the people and horses, forming a north-south attack.
Cao Cao's move completely broke through the traditional practice of "other armies sounding east, the main force attacking the west", but boldly adopting the tactic of "the main force sounding east, other armies attacking the west", turning the false emptiness into a vacuum void, so that Xu Huang could successfully complete the cutting of the Western Liang Army without effort.
Ma Chao and Han Sui's army became a lone army. Before the Western Liang army could react, it completely fell into passivity. Faced with this scene, Ma Chao and Han Sui wanted to make a quick decision, but Cao Cao closed the camp gate and carried out a siege to help. Ma Chao repeatedly led his army to besiege Cao Jun without success, but was used by Cao Cao to reverse the plot, which divided the relationship between the two.
The Western Liang Alliance was self-defeating and became another trophy for Cao Cao's special legion tigers and leopards.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="71" > Caesar's military art</h1>
After reading Cao Cao's "cutting tofu", let's look at Caesar's "surgery".
Compared with the oriental textbook "Sun Tzu's Art of War", ancient Europe did not have pure military theoretical works, but this does not mean that Europeans do not understand war in place, on the contrary, Europeans record their thoughts and thoughts on marching and fighting through notes, articles and other means, full of detail, compared with Oriental military works, but more grounded.
For example, Caesar's "Civil War" and "Gallic War" record in detail the process of Caesar's march and war and some impressions, which have inspired the military theories of later Generations in Europe.
Caesar's Roman corps continued the structure, tactics, and training methods of the Macedonian phalanx.
This classical formation, created by King Philip II of Macedon and dominated by heavy infantry, was tight and reliable. Each legion consisted of about 1500 men, divided into several small squares, each of which consisted of 16×16 and 32×16 — 16 men per row, and one captain in each row, standing in the first column.
The heavy regiment is armed with a 6-meter-long spear and a large shield. When encountering the enemy, these small squares of the Roman legion, with the captain as the tip, inserted into the enemy formation and dissected the enemy lineup like a scalpel. Subsequently, the heavy infantry armed with spears inflicted the first wave of casualties on the enemy, and then attacked them a second time with the short swords they carried with them.
It can be said that compared with the traditional legions, the Roman army has a deeper depth, a thicker lineup, and has been upgraded, each independent policy, has an independent combat ability, and cooperates with tacit understanding, and when facing the enemy, it is often invincible.
This invincibility of the Roman legions was fully reflected in the eight wars between Caesar and the Gauls.
The Gauls lived in the vast plains north of the Alps, which seriously threatened the survival of the Romans, and the Gauls even once captured the city of Rome, leaving Rome facing the disaster. Therefore, defeating Gaul became a must-have choice for the Romans to survive.
After Caesar became the governor of Gaul, he went to war with the Gauls several times. In 58 BC, a 300,000-strong Gallic army approached the Roman border. Caesar had only one corps of troops.
Faced with this scene, Caesar also completed the same feat as Cao Cao. He sent a small number of troops to meet the enemy head-on, and then led a large army across the Alps and ambushed to the side of the Gauls, and carried out wave after wave of "dismemberment" and encroachment on the Gallic army.
Under Caesar's uninterrupted division, the Gallic legion could not take care of each other and was in a mess. In the end, Caesar completed the "surgical" attack on the Gallic army, and the Gallic people were in chaos and defeated, and Caesar took advantage of the victory to pursue, almost completely annihilating the Gallic army.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="74" > what happened if Caesar met Cao Cao? </h1>
Both Caesar and Cao Cao were military masters who were good at dividing blows and striking east and west, but what would happen if the two met?
This requires first looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the two men, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of the Eastern and Western armies.
Cao Cao is longer than the overall strategy and shorter than the confrontation.
In the war to conquer Yuan Shao, Lü Bu, Liu Biao, Ma Chao, and Han Sui, Cao Cao played a role similar to Han Xin's overall situation, and often could complete the arrangement of the entire battlefield situation through the overall layout and remote command.
However, in the shaping of the army formation and the command of the front, Cao Cao was obviously weaker, and the battles he personally commanded were often unbearable, for example, in the Battle of Tongguan, Cao Cao's command of the front line once lost to Ma Chao and almost died in the northwest.
In contrast to Cao Cao, Caesar was good at commanding the front, but was slightly inferior in overall control.
In the eight battles of Caesar's army and the Gauls, they were all hard-hitting, relying on the depth and thickness of the lineup, completing the cutting, and then annihilating layer by layer, which was completely the traditional way of fighting in columns, and had a lot less of the taste of strategy.
The superiority or inferiority of the two men's military talents actually reflects the difference between the armies of the East and the West.
In the charge, the European army was obviously more orderly. Compared with the meticulous battle fronts and phalanxes of Greece, Rome and Macedonia, the Chinese army is often casual and loose, with less room for tactical operation, and the battlefield meets in a narrow way, relying entirely on a single charge, without the cooperation and aggregation between the various small teams.
However, in the combination of different arms, China's rules of warfare are superior. The Roman legions completed the upgrade on the basis of the Macedonian legions, but also continued the weaknesses of the Macedonians: the single class of troops, the mobility of the legions was too poor, resulting in a single way of fighting, and only one job could be done in battle - charging. In contrast, the Chinese military often uses a combination of cavalry, infantry, archers and equipment, full of flexibility and mobility.
Therefore, if Cao Cao's army encountered Caesar's Roman legions on the battlefield, Caesar had the advantage in the short term. The Roman legions could rely on a tight queue and close coordination to crush Cao Cao's army in the charge and occupy the commanding heights.
However, when Cao Cao's army once accustomed to this one-trick and bulky formation of the Roman legions, it would abandon the unified battlefield and use archers and cavalry to attack its two wings or rear, but not the front, and the Roman legions would inevitably function poorly, peeling off layer by layer like onions, and thus losing the entire battle situation.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="77" > written at the end</h1>
In summary, personal analysis favors Caesar's partial victory, but it will be Cao Cao who wins the big market.
At that time, the Huns and Mongols, who were good at multi-service coordination, relied on the relaxation of light and heavy cavalry to complete the ravages of the European heavy regiment and became a nightmare for Europeans.
Having said that, but the battlefield situation is ever-changing, determining the victory of the war, is never a factor of head-on confrontation, but also closely related to the terrain, climate, resources, and even luck, the small butterflies of South America can incite a tsunami in the Pacific, and the small Gelulu can also make the dominant Tang army completely destroyed in an instant.
What is presented on the battlefield is always only the final result, and it is the broad masses of the people who determine the outcome of the war. Therefore, the great man said that there will never be an undefeated general in the world, only the masses of the people will never be defeated.
Now, the realization of the cross-time and space duel of ancient civilizations in the history of the world is no longer limited to imagination. In the strategic mobile game "Awakening of All Nations", Cao Cao is not only able to meet Caesar, but also has 12 civilizations rising up together and chasing deer in the world. Let you immerse yourself in the military art of the world's legendary leaders and feel the epic grand process of historical civilization.
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