Chapter 13 no hero

Tang Shengzhi's decision was wise at the time.Nanjing is a river city, so many troops had to cross the river, plus refugees, there was not enough boats, and although the outside of the city was full of Japanese troops, there was still a huge gap. The problem is that the morale of the army has been chilled at this time, and most people still want to flee.Tang Shengzhi himself was not without loopholes. He should never have done what he should have done. After issuing the written order, he conveyed verbal instructions to the Central Army troops participating in the war: "If you can't break through all the encirclement, you can cross the river when there is a ferry. Gather to Chuzhou."

The seriousness of the order suddenly decreased, and it also showed once again that Tang Shengzhi did have a lot of problems in controlling the troops because he was not his own direct line of troops.Because of this, except for most of the Cantonese Army who were ordered to break out of the city, the rest of the troops, including the 74th Army, chose to cross the river to assemble in Chuzhou. According to Yu Jishi's instructions, Wang Yaowu divided the remnants of the Seventy-Fourth Army into two groups, one group tied up wooden rafts near Baguazhou, and the other group rushed to Xiaguan Wharf to take a boat.When Wang Yaowu personally led his troops to go to Xiaguan, they were blocked by the 36th Division. According to Tang Shengzhi's order, the division prevented all troops from retreating to Xiaguan, and kept firing warning shots, with bullets flying overhead.

Seeing this situation, many officers and soldiers were angry and impatient. Some said that we did not ask the Japanese to be shot to death, but it was very likely that we died under the guns of our own troops. The six divisions are fighting each other, maybe they can squeeze out a way to survive. Seeing that it was impossible to pass through, Wang Yaowu was deeply afraid that if he continued to delay, he would not be able to cross the river, so he decided to take a detour to Yijiangmen.On the way, people shouted and neighed, and the chaos reached the extreme. There were many abandoned wounded soldiers in each army. Among them, those who could barely walk could go to Xiaguan by themselves with sticks.This scene is very sad, because these abandoned wounded soldiers will only face one ending, that is, they will be killed by the Japanese army.Some wounded soldiers cursed angrily: "You all escaped and left us here. If I had known this, who would have fought!"

Wang Yaowu could only pretend to turn a deaf ear.When he arrived at Yijiang Gate, he saw that only one city gate was open, and there were so many people that the gate was narrow and extremely crowded. Some pack horses were overwhelmed and trampled to death when they passed by, but no one bothered to pull away the underground carriages that hindered walking. .Everyone's face was full of infinite panic and embarrassment.At this time, there are no heroes, only an instinctive desire to survive randomly rushing into people's hearts. Squeezing through the ghost gate, Wang Yaowu finally came to the Xiaguan River.The pier was already full of people, but there were very few boats on the river, and those boats were pre-occupied by troops who had planned for a long time.People without boats ran around like ants in a hot pot. They grabbed boats when they saw them, and even shot each other in order to compete for boats or rafts.Those who couldn't get a boat would cross the Yangtze River with a door panel or a log;

Many soldiers, including those poor wounded soldiers, were abandoned like the ordinary people who remained in Nanjing, and they would be slaughtered by the Japanese army.In China's 5,000-year history, there are countless such examples. People at the grassroots level are always pushed to the forefront of the flames of war consciously or unconsciously, but in the end, the first to be abandoned and sacrificed is often It is them, this cannot but be said to be the ugly dark side of a nation. Wang Yaowu on the bank of the river was in a hurry, and a liaison adjutant of the military department brought him life-saving information.

It turned out that when Yu Jishi had a premonition that the war would be unfavorable, he prepared a small steamer for the troops through the relationship between his clan uncle and transportation minister Yu Pengfei.This Noah's Ark-style small steamer can carry more than 300 people at a time, and Yu Jishi and others have already crossed the river on the small steamer. Wang Yaowu hurriedly transported the troops with a small steamer.It was rushed overnight, and until the early morning of December 13, the Japanese army blocked the Yangtze River. The Japanese ships rampaged on the river in Baguazhou, Xiaguan. It is no longer possible to cross the river to pick up people.

Nanjing fell, and what followed was a brutal massacre.This is an organized massacre, and it has a very deep psychological foundation among Japanese soldiers.Takashi Tanaka, a staff officer of the Kwantung Army before the war and later became the director of military affairs of the Ministry of Army, said unabashedly to others: "You regard Chinese people as human beings, but I regard Chinese people as pigs, no matter how you deal with them !" It is precisely because the commander-in-chief has the idea that "Chinese are pigs", so since they landed in Shanghai, they have ordered: "Women and children, all Chinese will be killed, and all houses will be burned." , Also developed the Japanese pirate style of "rape, plunder, and misbehave".

The Nanjing massacre was just a concentrated outbreak of this abnormal psychology.Their vengeance was further fueled by the staunch resistance of the Chinese, who were regarded as "pigs."An army reporter who recorded the "Nanjing Hundred People Killing Contest" admitted during the Tokyo trial that his nerves were in a state of numbness at the time, "Whenever I saw a large number of Japanese soldiers who fell in front of me, I would have a kind of wholehearted thought about what to do. If there is no desire for revenge from the enemy, a sadistic mentality will emerge.”

Even journalists are like this, and ordinary Japanese soldiers even take the massacre as a matter of course.The Japanese soldiers stationed in Xiaguan used barbed wire to tie the prisoners of war into bundles of ten, and then pushed them into a well and poured oil on them to burn them to death.The wild beasts called this method of killing "le Caobao", and believed that "killing has a feeling like killing a pig". The conscientious and the timid are terrified and disturbed.Some people will suffer from insomnia that night after experiencing the brutal beheading scene, and as soon as they close their eyes, they can see the head leaving the body flying into the air, spinning around.Three or four days later, the same nightmare still persisted.