Chronicle of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in ping'a Mountains of the Sixth Detachment of the Mountain Column "Tiger Second Battalion" (6)

East, East! Shandong Column Six Detachments "Tiger Second Battalion"

Chronicle of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in ping'a Mountains (6)

——Remembering the ancestors of the family war

6. The Bloody Battle of Huangpo

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The eve of the Yellow Slope Bloody Battle. On February 13, 1940, the day after the end of the Battle of Montenegro, the six detachments received a decision from the Luxi District Committee and the Luxi Military Region conveyed by the prefectural committee, and in order to consolidate the Luxi anti-Japanese base area, Comrade He Guangyu personally led six detachments and a team to Luxi to participate in the campaign against the rebel Shi Yousan, and arrived at Acheng Town, Xiyanggu County, Dongping Lake within one week. The leaders of the prefectural party committee and the six detachments studied and decided that the second battalion would carry out this combat task; at that time, the task was only conveyed to several leaders of the second battalion, and there was no time to convey it to the company cadres; considering that the troops could shorten the distance by one day from the Ping'a Mountains directly to the west of Dongping Lake, they did not move to the Taifei Mountains or Dongping mountains, so that the troops could be transferred from Nanmaoyu to Huangpo to rest nearby, but they did not expect the enemy's retaliatory siege to come so quickly.

On February 15, 1940, three days after the Battle of Montenegro, the second battalion of our army was stationed in the villages of Dahuangpo and Xiaohuangpo for recuperation. Taking advantage of the heavy snow and fog, the Japanese puppet army gathered more than a thousand people from five counties, including Dongping, Dong'a, Pingyin, Changqing, and Feicheng, and surrounded the villages of Dahuangpo in an attempt to annihilate our army in the deep mountains and ditches in order to avenge the battle in Montenegro.

At that time, Commander He Guangyu, operational staff officer Li Xue, reconnaissance staff officer Qiu Kenan, and other comrades lived with the battalion headquarters, the battalion headquarters and the fifth, seventh, and eighth companies lived in Dahuangpo Village, and the sixth company lived in Xiaohuangpo. At that time, because the sixth company could not be contacted, the commander of the unit decided: Five companies blocked the enemy attacking Huangpo Village in the north, and the seventh company and the eighth company respectively blocked the enemy on the mountains on the west, south, and east sides, forming a circular defense, so that the enemy could not narrow the encirclement of the headquarters from the flank. The battalion command post was located in a hollow behind the South Mountain, and Comrade He Guangyu commanded together with the battalion commander and political commissar, calling on all commanders and fighters to hold their positions, use the favorable terrain to kill and injure the enemy, save themselves, and persist in organizing a breakthrough after dark.

After Comrade Xia Shulin, the commander of the Fifth Company, was killed in the battle of Montenegro in the past, a platoon commander Meng Qian was promoted to deputy company commander. The enemy concentrated artillery fire on the south mountain, bomb fragments and stones flew all over the mountain, and the battalion soldiers had no fortifications and no cover, and could only scatter and hide behind the rocks one by one.

After the artillery fire, Wang Ruichen and other five companies of fighters engaged the enemy's short soldiers and launched a hand-to-hand combat of bayonets, the bayonet flashed, blood splashed everywhere, and the shouts of killing shook the sky and resounded throughout the valley.

At about 10:00 a.m., Meng Qian, deputy company commander of the Fifth Company, was surrounded by the enemy and died heroically, the wounded had nowhere to move but to bandage on the spot behind the boulders, and in the gap between the artillery bombardment of the Japanese army, political instructor Xu Baoxin went to the front to encourage the commanders and fighters to visit the soldiers and wounded comrades. 【13】

The second battalion immediately appointed Sun Lianjie (a native of Feicheng, who had just turned 16 years old) to succeed Meng Qian, the deputy company commander of the sacrificed company, to continue to command the operation of the five companies, and the main and deputy platoon commanders were killed and injured one after another, and Sun Lianjie designated the squad leader Chen Wensheng as the acting platoon leader.

Next, Wang Ruichen and the soldiers, correspondents, trumpeters, and hygienists all put on bayonets and engaged in a face-to-face white-knife fight with the Japanese army, Wang Ruichen was stabbed in the left hand by the Japanese devil's gun during the fight, revealing white bones, but he only fought with the enemy and forgot the pain.

At about 12:00 noon, the Japanese army carried out the third attack, this time the artillery fire was particularly fierce, the whole mountain was shrouded in a sea of smoke and fire, the deafening loud noise reverberated on the position, people could not hear anything even if they shouted face to face, shrapnel and rubble flew everywhere, and the whole mountain was vibrating like a beating, and there was really a tendency for landslides to crack. Under the cover of artillery fire, the Japanese puppet army pounced like locusts, the number was much more than the previous two times, and the momentum was also more ferocious than the previous two times, and the two sides fought a bloody battle in the dark and dark, and the structure of the second battalion of troops was completely disrupted.

At this moment, when Wang Ruichen was hiding behind a large rock cliff and getting up to prepare to shoot, he was shot by a Japanese bullet that broke his left arm and left abdomen, and he was hit by shrapnel in many places on his body, and he was seriously injured and incapacitated. All the fighters only hope to stay up until dark is victory, the snow does not stop for a day, the snow is flying, and from the morning onwards, the warriors have not drunk snow for a day to quench their thirst.

Looking around, some of the comrades who sacrificed their brains burst out, some pierced their chests, the blood of the wounded soldiers flowed, stained the snow red, the bent bayonets, the broken rifles, the broken clothes everywhere, the shell craters one by one, after the smoke and fire, the mountains were covered with white snow and a piece of yellow, the corpses were everywhere unable to distinguish between the enemy and the enemy, the bloody rain, the bloody rain, the bloody rain, the time seemed to be infinitely delayed by the difficulty of the second, everyone only looked forward to the early black sky in order to break through.

At about 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., the devils launched the fourth and fifth attacks, but it was the end of the crossbow, and the grenades of the second battalion ran out of bullets and hit them with few bullets, so they were condescending and stoned. Wang Ruichen's fifth company and 1 company resisted the enemy ten times greater than himself, repelled five consecutive Japanese attacks, Sun Lianjie's blood-stained clothes, the wound on his left hand exposed white bones, and the left hand extension was limited for more than seventy years. In the winter, the days in the mountains were particularly short, and it was dark at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and the enemy stopped attacking except for a burst of cold artillery and machine gun fire.

At 7:00 p.m., Commander He Guangyu and Hu Xunwu and He Cheng decided to break through the encirclement circle toward the Taifei Mountains: The battalion headquarters led the seventh and eighth companies as a first echelon, led by Hu Xunwu and He Cheng, to break through along the Huangpo Nanshan To the southeast, and the deputy battalion commander Jin Shilin led the fifth and seventh companies to form a platoon as the second echelon, along the Huangpo Nanshan Mountain to the east, leaving the reconnaissance platoon to break through to the west and look for the sixth company in the Ping'a Mountains.

The time of the breakthrough was set at 10 p.m., commander He asked for everyone's opinion after explaining the breakthrough matters, and everyone said that it was not difficult to bury the remains of the fallen soldiers without other difficulties, and after agreeing, it was decided to cover the remains of the sacrificial soldiers with snow on the side of the big stone, and then return to the funeral after the enemy retreated. How do seriously injured people carry them away? Battalion commander Hu Xunwu said: "We did not have a stretcher during the Long March, so we took off our shirts, put two rifles into the sleeves of our clothes to become a simple stretcher, and carried them with four soldiers." Now all the light and seriously wounded are carried away, the guns cannot be lost, the light wounded are supported by their comrades-in-arms, and the seriously wounded are carried by their comrades-in-arms to break through." At that time, it was agreed that in case of being scattered by the enemy, the meeting place would be in the Guliu area of the Taifei Mountains.

At about 10:00 p.m., the fifth company was the vanguard of the breakthrough, and a squad of the fifth company was divided into three groups and quietly went down the hill to approach the edge of the village, shot and threw grenades, bluffed, harassed the enemy, and distracted the company to cover the breakthrough. Sun Lianjie and Jin Shilin, deputy battalion commanders, along with the soldiers of the Fifth Company, carried the wounded through the steep cliffs patrolled by the enemy above to break through the heavy encirclement.

At more than 10:00 a.m. on February 16, the two battalions that protruded from the siege traveled more than 60 miles to Guliu Village in Feicheng. Subsequently, Wang Ruichen was sent to the Rear Hospital of the Eighth Route Army in the Area of Mountain Temple, Mount Di, and Wubu for treatment along the Light and Heavy Wounds.

In the Battle of Huangpo, our army, with the fearless spirit of seeing death as a homecoming, with our invincible heroism, and with weapons and equipment far inferior to the enemy, smashed the enemy's retaliatory "sweeping" and eliminated more than 200 Japanese puppet troops, of which the Japanese brigade leader Watanabe Shosa was killed.

In the First World War of Huangpo, the second battalion paid a heavy price. The battle was fought from 8 o'clock in the morning to 6 o'clock in the evening, the enemy organized five attacks, and our army implemented a flexible mode of combat, sometimes counterattacking the enemy at a long distance, sometimes carrying out hand-to-hand combat with the enemy at close range, holding on for more than ten hours, and holding the position. However, our army also suffered heavy losses, especially the five companies that undertook the main combat tasks sacrificed more than fifty people and suffered more than thirty wounded, the instructor Xu Baoxin and the deputy company commander Meng Qian were sacrificed, only two of the six main and deputy platoon commanders were left, and most of the ten squad leaders suffered casualties. [14] Before the Battle of Montenegro, there were more than 180 people in the Battle of Montenegro, eighteen casualties in the Battle of Montenegro, the backbone of the Huangpo Battle was basically exhausted, the instructors and deputy company commanders were sacrificed, and the ammunition was basically exhausted.

On February 17, the military order was as good as a mountain, and the second battalion broke through to the area of Guliu and Fozhuang in Feicheng, and there was no time to rest, and the second battalion and a company of the special service battalion left the Taifei Mountains under the leadership of Commander He Guangyu through DongxigouLiu, Dong'acheng, Dongping Lake, Banjiudian, and crossed the Yellow River to Acheng Town, Yanggu County, one hundred and fifty miles away, and participated in the campaign against the rebel Shi Yousan.

On February 19, 1940, the second battalion of the six detachments was ordered to attack the Chailou stronghold in the northeast of Shouzhang County [5], and then participated in a series of battles. In February 1940, in recognition of the important contributions made by the two battalions of the six detachments in the anti-stubborn operation in Rusi, the Rusi Military District awarded the battalion the honorary title of "Tiger Battalion".

(To be continued)