Li Guang's failure to be crowned marquis in his lifetime was the greatest difficulty of the Chinese literati.
The young genius Wang Bo wrote with regret in the "Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion":
Woohoo! Bad luck and bad luck. Feng Tang is old, Li Guang is difficult to seal
”。 In addition to Wang Bo, Wang Changling, Gao Shi, Du Fu, Lu You, Wang Anshi and others also wrote poems praising Li Guang.
The sentence "But make the Dragon City fly will be in place, and do not teach Humadu Yin Mountain" portrays the majestic spirit of "Flying General" Li Guang to the fullest.
Then, Li Guang, who could shoot a tiger with a bow and command an army on horseback, and completely fought from the Xiongnu invasion to the counterattack on the desert north, why did he not succeed in the marquis until his death?
Always lost, is the "flying general" Li Guang, lingering nightmare. As an older general of the older generation who is an expert in urban offensive and defensive warfare, how bad is his sense of direction in the grassland movement warfare?
In 130 AD, Emperor Wu of han counterattacked the Xiongnu for the first time, and Wei Qing, Gongsun Ao, Gongsun He, and Li Guang each led 10,000 cavalry to attack. Gongsun Ao lost 7,000 fine horses; Li Guang's entire army was destroyed, captured by the Xiongnu and then escaped; Gongsun He turned around and returned without success; only Wei Qingqi attacked Longcheng and beheaded more than 700 Xiongnu.
It can be seen from this that Emperor Wu of Han did not give Li Guang the opportunity to be a commander, but only Wei Qing stood out after each of the ten thousand horsemen to test the gold.
But the best thing that Emperor Wu of Han did to the generals was that he gave you enough opportunities to try and make mistakes, so after Gongsun Ao lost 7,000 soldiers and Li Guang lost tens of thousands of people, according to the law, he should have been executed and paid a fine, but he was only demoted to a commoner.
By the time Li Guangfu had been idle for several years and reactivated, Wei Qing had already achieved: 30,000 horses out of Yanmen and beheaded thousands; defeated the Xiongnu White Sheep King and the Lou Fu King, and recovered the Hetao Plain and expanded the land for thousands of miles; surprise attacked the Xiongnu Right Sage King, capturing 15,000 men and women; and twice leading 100,000 troops to attack the Xiongnu, beheading more than 10,000 people.
At this time, Li Guang and Wei Qing were completely unable to keep pace, and in the face of solid and heavy battle achievements, Li Guang could only become Wei Qing's general.
It is not shameful to be replaced by Wei Qing' latecomers, after all, Wei Qing is not a famous general in the world, but What makes Li Guang sad is that he has been surpassed by Wei Qing's other generals.
The generals were the first to take the lead, and the merit was the one who took the throne, while the Guangdong army had no merit. - "The Chronicle of History"
100,000 Han troops went out to Dingxiang, and the commander Wei Qing's subordinates beheaded more than 10,000 people in total, and many of them were knighted for military merit, but Li Guang's troops actually returned without success. You can imagine what a huge blow this was for Emperor Wen, Emperor Jing, Emperor Wu, and Li Guang, a veteran of the Three Dynasties.
What is even more poignant is that there is no black box operation in this, and behind the difference in the number of decapitations, it is only Li Guang's era that has passed.
A general who is unable to make a timely judgment on the position of the other side in the steppe movement war cannot make a battle achievement. Therefore, in order to take care of this late "flying general", he traveled thousands of miles to the western region and found Zhang Qian, the Marquis of Bowang of the Great Moon Clan in Central Asia, and was sent to Li Guang as a GPS and went out of Right Beiping.
At the age of two, Guang Yilang Zhongling rode four thousand out of Right Beiping, and Zhang Qian, the Marquis of Bowang, rode Wan and Guangju.
But a dramatic scene appeared, Zhang Qian, who was running rampant in the western region and thousands of miles in Central Asia, actually lost his way in cooperation with Li Guang. Li Guang's 4,000 cavalry was besieged by 40,000 Xiongnu Zuoxian, and Li Guang's son Li Dare led dozens of horses back and forth to charge and kill, and Li Guang shot the Xiongnu generals with a large yellow crossbow to barely maintain morale.
The two sides fought fiercely for half a day, the Han army suffered more than half of the losses, the crossbow arrows were exhausted, and the next day Zhang Qian led 10,000 people to help the Xiongnu before retreating. In this battle, Li Guang lost more than half of his troops and killed quite a few, so he was useless. Zhang Qian's rescue was late, and he should have been executed, deposed the Marquis of Bowang, and demoted to a commoner.
So why did Zhang Qian, a GPS who was born as a messenger and traversed Thousands of Miles in Central Asia, get lost when he met Li Guang?
This has to start from Li Guang's combat style, when Li Guang was still an unknown general in Shangjun during the Wen Dynasty, a eunuch emissary came to inspect the border defenses. This emissary led more than a dozen Han riders out of the fortress and encountered three Xiongnu cavalrymen. Originally wanting to hit more and less, the result was that the three Huns were skilled in riding and shooting, and more than a dozen Han people rode kites, but the eunuchs not only failed to catch the Huns, but also shot several of their own people.
Returning to the camp, the eunuch emissaries found Li Guang, who was known for his good shooting, and chased them with more than a hundred cavalry. Li Guang's lone army pursued for hundreds of miles, shooting two Xiongnu and only one escaping, but because he was far away from Shangjun, he encountered thousands of Xiongnu cavalry. A hundred Han riders were so frightened that they demanded a retreat.
Li Guang said, "We are already a hundred miles away from Shangjun, and the Xiongnu are numerous. If we run away during the day and they chase us and shoot arrows, none of us will be able to run. You can only scare the Huns first, and then leave when it gets dark." Therefore, Li Guang ordered everyone to get off their horses and rest, and the Xiongnu saw that the Han army was so slack, thinking that this was a reconnaissance army, and there were heavy troops behind them.
Li Guang, taking advantage of the suspicion of the Xiongnu, took more than a dozen Han horses who were good at shooting, turned on his horse and shot the Xiongnu generals, and the Xiongnu retreated in fear.
The next day, Li Guang withdrew his troops, and when he returned to the camp, there was no one to rescue him, and when he asked, no one knew where Li Guang had gone, so naturally there was no way to rescue him.
Pingdan, Li Guangnai returned to his army. The army did not know the vastness, so it obeyed.
It can be seen from this that li Guang's lone army did not communicate with the Han army in the rear in real time at all. Moreover, when encountering the main force of the Xiongnu, Li Guang did not delay the time because the enemy was outnumbered, but repeatedly attacked with weak blows and boosted morale.
This is the reason why Li Guang's troops have a surprisingly high rate of battle losses, either the entire army is destroyed or more than half of the losses are lost.
The most difficult thing for marching to fight, especially steppe cavalry, is not to boost morale, but to judge the direction, find fighters, and replenish water. Take Huo's illness as an example, Huo's disease has a long-distance attack, relying on the submissive Xiongnu department as a guide. Moreover, it can be used to raise war with war, indicating that Huo has a mature network of sentry horses and guides.
Although Wei Qing did not have so many Xiongnu subordinates, Zhao Xin, a renegade Xiongnu, was once also Wei Qing's most powerful cadre. In addition, Wei Qing's personality is calm and heavy, and the unexpected encounter in the Northern Desert Decisive Battle is single to the main force.
After Wei Qing knew that his men were not as good as the main force alone, he changed the defensive vehicle formation in time and turned to attack the Han army's crossbow advantage to make up for the weakness of the troops.
However, Li Guang's 4,000 cavalry, encountering 40,000 men of Zuo Xian, actually took the initiative to charge under the disparity of 1:10 troops, and lost more than half of the day. He did not know how to change with the times and to guide him according to the situation, but only knew that he would rush and strike hard, that is, the unbridgeable command gap between Li Guang, Wei Qing, and Huo Zhiyi.
Therefore, based on the fact that the main force of the Han army that Li Guang left the camp did not know his position, and Li Guang's experience of getting lost and out of date many times in his life.
It was not that Zhang Qian's GPS failed, but that Li Guang did not keep in touch with Zhang Qian at all during the march, and when he encountered zuo xian wang's main force, he directly charged instead of taking defense to delay time. It was not easy for Zhang Qian to find Li Guang in one day in the vast grassland.
However, when he met Li Guang, more than half of Li Guang's 4,000 people had been damaged, and Zhang Qian's loss of time had become a fact. It can be said that Zhang Qian crossed thousands of miles across the Western Regions, and the Marquis of Bowang, who had only been exchanged for the Great Moon Clan, was directly swept away by Li Guang's wave of charge.
It would be impossible for anyone to find and support friendly forces in less than a day in the vast grasslands.
Returning to the problem that Li Guang is always lost and unable to be enfeoffed, Cheng Buzhi, who is equally famous with Li Guang, is very illustrative. Li Guang's march was very simple, where the water and grass were abundant, he camped and slept there. There were no military regulations to restrain the soldiers, nor did they patrol the camp or garrison the village, so the soldiers were willing to follow Li Guang.
However, Cheng did not know that military discipline was strict, and he was repairing camps and sending scouts, and the soldiers were tossed and turned enough. Although he had not been attacked by the enemy army, the soldiers were not willing to follow him, and Li Guang could be said to be two extremes.
These two people, one is not a big victory or a big defeat, the other is never a big victory, will not be a big defeat.
Therefore, looking back on Li Guang's life, Li Guang has never changed. From the side to the general, he was always the "flying general" who shared the happiness and hardships with the soldiers, simplified the march, and encountered the enemy as a morale-boosting charge.
It has become just the era, Li Guang is still that Li Guang, but the battlefield is no longer that battlefield.
Unlike the densely populated Han Dynasty, the vast grasslands require both the ability to grasp the fighter plane and the orientation problem that should not be considered in the unfamiliar environment, and positioning is the first major issue. Li Guang obviously did not realize this, and minimized the contempt for scouts and intelligence of the march, which doomed Li Guang to make it difficult to make a victory in the grassland.
The character of being too fierce and not knowing how to adapt to changes also determined that Li Guang's marching army had no attack or defense, and it was sad that the main force of the Xiongnu would suffer heavy losses.
If Cheng did not know how to survive to the grassland war, he would miss the fighter plane because he was too heavy;when Li Guang came to the grassland, he always got lost because he despised the scouts and intelligence network too much, which was the reason why the set of offensive and defensive battles in the Han City pool was completely ineffective in the grassland movement war in which the war situation was changing rapidly.
Therefore, Li Guang's unsealing is not accidental, but an old general who cannot innovate in the great changes of the times and is eventually abandoned by the times. With 4,000 cavalry charging Zuo Xianwang's 40,000 cavalry, more than half of the damage in one day, even if the GPS Zhang Qian is replaced, who can find and support in the vast grassland in less than a day, this late "flying general"?