Wen | against the north
01 Zeng Guoquan soldiers into the Yuhuatai is a lone army deep?
In Chinese history, it is not uncommon to win more with less, but in the Battle of Yuhuatai in the autumn of 1862, the Xiang army was able to resist the Taiping Army, which was ten times larger than itself, with about 20,000 troops for nearly two months, and finally successfully forced the other side to retreat. The reason behind this is worth playing carefully with modern people.
In March 1962, the elite Xiang army, which had been resting in Anqing, went down the river with the cooperation of the water division and directly attacked the political heart of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Tianjing (today's Nanjing). Zeng Guoquan, the former enemy commander of the Xiang Army who was on the task of attacking Tianjing at that time, was full of confidence in this battle, and in less than two months, he basically eliminated the Taiping Army's stronghold along the river between Anqing and Tianjing, directly inserted itself into Tianjing City, and camped outside Yuhuatai in May.
Zeng Guoquan's attack cannot be described as dangerous. Because at that time, there were still hundreds of thousands of Taiping troops around Tianjing. In addition, Li Xiucheng, the loyal king who sat in Suzhou, also had a large number of fresh forces that had experienced the baptism of the battle in Shanghai. Most of these elites were equipped with foreign guns and cannons, and in zeng Guoquan's words, the firearms owned by Li Xiucheng's men were "a hundred times more proficient" than those of the Xiang army near Yuhuatai. For the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, although the Xiang army that came to attack was menacing, it was also a piece of fat that was sent to the front of the eyes on its own initiative. Since the Qing army took the initiative to send it to the door this time, why couldn't it give full play to its advantages in home combat and concentrate its forces to annihilate it in one fell swoop?
You know, there is no shortage of precedents for such a strategy. A few years ago, the 7,000 Xiang army under Li Xubin was eaten by Chen Yucheng and Li Xiucheng's troops in Sanhe.
However, speaking of this, there is a question that must be clarified in advance, that is, is Zeng Guoquan's encampment in Yuhuatai a "lone soldier committing a risk"? If we combine other factors in the battlefield at that time, we will find that the Xiang Army did not go deep alone again, but came prepared.
Why? First, although Zeng Guoquan's Xiang Army land combat unit was only about 20,000, it was basically a veteran who had experienced the baptism of attack and defense in Anqing, and was very good at attacking strong points and field battles. In addition, their ingredients are relatively pure, basically from the Huxiang region, and their loyalty to the Zeng Guoquan brothers is extremely high, far from being a ragtag group of people who are temporarily patchwork.
Second, in addition to the army, Zeng Guoquan also had the well-equipped artillery of the water division Peng Yulin to support himself. At this time, the Xiang Army's water division had basically mastered the dominance of the Yangtze River, and the material supplies needed by Zeng Guoquan's department could be quickly transported through waterways. However, because most of the Taiping Army's strongholds along the river were destroyed or occupied, and the quality of its own ships could not compete with one of them, it had to watch the Xiang Army's sailors freely shuttle through the river network in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
Like Zeng Guoquan, Peng Yulin was also brave and strategic, in order to further attack the main force of the Taiping Army near Tianjing to support Zeng Guoquan's siege operation. He also occupied Jiangxinzhou and drove his warships directly to the moat of Tianjing to anchor. At this point, the Xiang Army was even more like a tiger. It should be known that even if Shi Dakai, the recognized god of war of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, had to destroy the water division of the Xiang Army in the Battle of Hukou, in order to calmly devote himself to the battle against the infantry and cavalry of the Xiang Army. Now the Taiping Army had no choice but to take the Xiang Army's water division, which had already plunged itself into the embarrassing situation of passive combat.
02 Li Xiucheng had no choice but to return to help
The Xiang army camped outside yuhuatai, causing great shock to the Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan. He did not expect that since the Jiangnan camp was attacked by the Taiping Army in 1860, the Qing army actually dared to threaten itself under the city. Will the side of the bed allow others to sleep soundly? He decided to dispatch the Tianjing defenders to attack first, taking advantage of the unstable foothold of Zeng Guoquan's troops outside the city and defeating them in one fell swoop. However, the Taiping Army, which had gone out of the city to attack the stronghold, soon found that the Xiang Army was not eager to engage its own short troops, but relied on the outer trenches to fortify and continue to consume the Tianjing defenders who rushed to the front. Soon, Hong Xiuquan himself sensed that the other side was not good, and he decided to turn to Li Xiucheng, the loyal king who was planning another attack on Shanghai in Suzhou, and asked him to fire the army to reinforce Tianjing and completely eliminate the Xiang army near Yuhuatai.
In the face of Hong Xiuquan's urging, Li Xiucheng was initially reluctant to go to the aid of the siege. This is not to say that he is greedy for life and afraid of death, but because Li Xiucheng feels that there is an undercurrent within the Sufu Province he controls, and many senior generals have the intention of colluding with the Qing army to subvert their rule. If he had left in a hurry, he would have been likely to "have both money and wealth" (as it was later, Gao Yongkuan and eight others assassinated Tan Shaoguang, the king of Mu, and dedicated Suzhou, the political center of Sufu Province, to Li Hongzhang).
In addition, Li Xiucheng believed that the Xiang army had just broken through Anqing at this time, and there were water divisions to provide fire support, and the arrogance was booming, and if he was eager to fight with the other side, instead of taking advantage, it would worsen the situation near Tianjing. Therefore, a better way for him was to first use money and grain to support the Tianjing defenders, and then wait until he defeated the Huai army and the Changsheng army, and the Xiang army under the Tianjing City lost the morale of the first march, and it was not too late to attack at that time.
However, Hong Xiuquan was not as calm as Li Xiucheng, and because Li Xiucheng's attitude on the matter of returning to Beijing was vague, Hong Xiuquan believed that the loyalty of the king was questionable, so he urged it even more tightly. In desperation, Li Xiucheng, the King of Zhong, had to hastily arrange the defense of Suzhou, leaving Tan Shaoguang to suppress the local area, while he himself commanded more than 100,000 troops to relieve the siege of Tianjing.
(Li Xiucheng in the TV series "Taiping Heavenly Kingdom", second from the left)
In mid-September 1962, after the main force under the command of Li Xiucheng, the King of Zhong, had assembled near Moling Pass, he immediately contacted the defenders in Tianjing City and agreed to jointly attack the 20,000 Xiang troops outside Yuhuatai.
At this time, the situation was quite bad for Zeng Guoquan, because at this time the Jiangnan region had entered a cold and wet autumn, and the epidemic was rampant, and although Zeng Guoquan himself did not fall ill, his deputy commander, his brother Zeng Guobao, was knocked down. At this time, Zeng Guobao led a crack army to camp at Jiangdong Bridge in the west of Tianjing City, and was responsible for defending the grain and food channels of the besieging Xiang army. The brother was seriously ill, and as the commander-in-chief, Zeng Guoquan was inevitably upset, but the problem was far more than that, and about 30% of the soldiers in the army he commanded were actually killed by the epidemic, in addition, among the remaining, about half of the officers and men were deeply troubled by the disease.
03 The Xiang army fought a battle against the water and killed the opponent
The Xiang army outside the Yuhuatai was at its weakest. Just at this time, hundreds of thousands of the main forces of the Taiping Army launched a huge attack under the personal planning and arrangement of Li Xiucheng. When Zeng Guofan, who was far away in Anqing, learned of this, he couldn't sleep at night.
Li Xiucheng knew that at this time, the Xiang army was not yet mature, because he did not have a decent water army, so he could only hope that his men and horses could rely on the large number of people to give Zeng Guoquan's troops a Taishan crush. Only to see the Taiping Army's black pressure on the outer trenches of the Xiang Army, the infantry rushing in front of them tried to fill the deep ditch with straw and earth and stones to open up passages for the follow-up troops, and the latecomers cast guns and artillery in an effort to suppress Zeng Guoquan's firepower. At the beginning of the battle, the Xiang general Ni Gui was killed, and Zeng Guoquan's face was also scratched by shrapnel. However, due to the narrow space on the battlefield, the water division of the Xiang Army kept harassing the mobile forces of the Taiping Army on the periphery, and the Taiping Army attacked for half a month and found nothing.
As the weather turned cold, the weaknesses of the Taiping Army were also exposed, and according to Li Xiucheng's later recollection in his "Self-Description", the army rushed to the aid, did not bring clothing for the winter cold, and was extremely short of food.
These problems should have been expected, because the Taiping Army dispatched more than 200,000 troops to break the Xiang army camp outside Yuhuatai this time, and the daily consumption of grain was huge, and in stark contrast, it was the deserted scene of ten rooms and nine empty rooms along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. The ongoing war has completely dragged down the agricultural economy of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and Zeng Guoquan's side can still be supplied from Jiangxi and Hubei, while Li Xiucheng can only raise grain on the spot, but what greets him is an embarrassing situation with no grain to raise.
Seeing that the strong attack would not work, in order to end the battle as soon as possible, he decided to transfer Li Shixian's troops from Zhejiang to assist in the battle, and on the other hand, he used the method of digging tunnels to break through Zeng Guoquan's camp. The fighting that followed became more intense. The addition of Zhejiang reinforcements increased the Number of Taiping troops near Yuhuatai to about 200,000. The Xiang army confronted it still had less than 20,000 men. The ratio of troops between the two sides was a surprising 10:1.
The Taiping Army, which was attacking from the front, fell down a batch and pounced on another batch. Many of the Xiang army's brave men killed the red eye, jumped out of the earth wall, and used white-knife warfare or close-range guns to eliminate the approaching Taiping Army. Of course, they themselves suffered some casualties. Seeing that the outer trenches were filled in and the earthen walls had collapsed in many places, Zeng Guoquan decided to shrink the defensive line and fight against the approaching Taiping Army by digging inner trenches and increasing fortifications.
The Xiang army dared to seize the opportunity to engage in hand-to-hand combat, which caused the morale of the Taiping Army to suffer a certain blow, while the Taiping Army no longer had the courage to fight in close combat at the beginning of the Guangxi uprising. In the Battle of Yuhuatai, they could only use their guns and cannons to attack the Xiang army at a certain distance, and once the distance was shortened, they hesitated, and some soldiers even fought the idea of perfunctory Li Xiucheng and reaching a "mutual non-aggression" agreement with Zeng Guoquan. How can this battle continue to be fought?
In the end, Li Xiucheng was disappointed in the frontal assault, and could only wait for the tunnels to be dug and a new attack route to be opened from the ground. However, the Xiang army was not a vegetarian, and they had long expected that the Taiping Army would open up passages from underground, so they increased their vigilance and used long trenches to counter the Taiping Army trapped in the tunnels.
At this time, the Xiang army outside Yuhuatai had already made up its mind to fight a battle, and Zeng Guoquan himself regretted that he had taken the enemy lightly before, but at this time there was no way to retreat, so he had to grit his teeth and continue to drag Li Xiucheng's army to death. Even the death of his brother Zeng Guobao could not shake his will.
However, Li Xiucheng, the loyal king who had absolute superiority in troops, could not afford to spend some time, because he had been fighting with Zeng Guoquan's troops for nearly two months. In the past two months, the Xiang army's Duolong'a and Bao Chao's troops have encroached on many prefectures and counties originally controlled by the Taiping Army, and the Huai army that counterattacked from Shanghai has also won successive battles. As the only pillar of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's military, he could not watch the more than 200,000 troops being dragged to a point on the Yuhuatai for a long time. Therefore, the so-called two evils were the lesser, and Li Xiucheng decided to temporarily withdraw the siege, implement the strategy of "attacking the north and attacking the south," and lure the Xiang army on the outskirts of Tianjing to retreat by attacking the rear of the Xiang army in the southern Anhui region.
This is naturally difficult to achieve. Due to Li Xiucheng's hasty withdrawal from the siege, the Taiping Army brigade was not well coordinated in the process of leaving the battlefield, and as a result, Zeng Guoquan seized the opportunity to counterattack, and defeated the army, killing and wounding more than 10,000 people. When Li Xiucheng jumped to other theaters of war to harass the Qing army, the Xiang army took advantage of the situation and attacked Yuhuatai in April 1863. According to Zeng Guoquan's war report, his side only paid the price of two deaths. After that, the key passes near Tianjing City, such as the following passes, the Grass Shoe Gorge and the JiuhuanZhou, were lost one after another. The Xiang army, which had once entered directly with a single sword, had formed a strong encirclement of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom defenders in Tianjing.
The Xiang army of less than 20,000 had defeated an enemy ten times larger than itself.
Now, it was Li Xiucheng's turn to bear the taste of passive defense.
bibliography:
Luo Ergang, "Notes on the Original Manuscript of Li Xiucheng's Self-Description", Zhonghua Bookstore
Wang Rongsheng et al., History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, People's Publishing House
Zhao Erxun et al., Draft History of the Qing Dynasty, Zhonghua Bookstore
(Qing) Zhu Kongzhang, "Biography of the Zhongxing General Shuai Bei", Yuelu Book Club
Long Shengyun, Draft History of the Xiang Army, Sichuan People's Publishing House