Chapter 30 Battlefield

Even if the supply troops were wiped out, the casualties of the rest of the arms can be imagined. Walking into Leimingguliu Village, Tang Yongliang and his entourage found eight characters inscribed with a knife by the Japanese army on the big tree trunk beside the village: "The place where Leimingguliu fought fiercely." In October, the Takeuchi troops will sleep under this tree." When the Chinese army attacked Thunder and Drum Liu, it was not just a fierce battle. It was a super-scale hand-to-hand combat. In the battle until dawn, more than a thousand Japanese soldiers were killed near the village.

Among the three sub-battlefields, Lei Minggu Liu has the most Japanese graves.The reason is that before the 106th Division of the Japanese Army was about to disband and return to China, 300 Japanese soldiers lived in Leimingguliu Village for three days, and held a memorial ceremony for the fallen Japanese soldiers. The Japanese nation has its own unique outlook on life and death, and they respect the dead very much.Every Japanese soldier's tomb has a spiritual tablet. In front of the tomb, there are short tubes cut from bamboo. There is a pair of pine branches and wild flowers in each grave.If it is an officer's tomb, three or four layers of brick platforms will be inlaid around the tomb.

Even so, only a small number of Japanese officers and soldiers were lucky enough to be buried.Walking along the roads around Leiming Guliu, you can still see the bones of Japanese soldiers and their horses everywhere. It is not too much to say that a corpse is five steps away, and a horse is ten steps away. The basis Tang Yongliang used to identify the Japanese soldiers was mainly the rubber shoes worn on their feet.It is said that because the Japanese often wear herringbone slippers, there is a large gap between the big toe and the rest of the toes, so the style of the rubber shoes worn by the Japanese soldiers is also quite special, which can be seen at a glance.

All are rubber shoes worn by the Japanese army.Undoubtedly, there must have been many remains of Chinese soldiers here, but except for a few that were not found at that time, most of them were properly buried when the battlefield was cleaned. Still go back to that night of hand-to-hand combat.The Cantonese Death Squad attacked several times near the headquarters of the 106th Division of the Japanese Army. Lieutenant General Junrokuro Matsuura, the commander of the 106th Division, sent out his staff to join the battle, and he himself had a gun in his hand.If the Death Squad could advance another 100 meters, Matsuura would face the fate of being captured or seppuku. Unfortunately, it was too dark, and the Death Squad didn't know where the head office of the Japanese army was, so the opportunity to kill the general was missed. Pass.

When the news that the 106th Division was in danger reached the headquarters of the 11th Army of the Japanese Army, Miyazaki, the head of the combat section, was shocked on Monday.Originally, Miyazaki was going to inspect the Guangji battlefield on the north bank of the Yangtze River with the commander of the army Neiji Okamura, so he had to ask another lieutenant staff officer to accompany him on his behalf. Miyazaki did not dare to report the specific situation to Okamura, but Okamura actually already knew.How could the Chinese side not report such a major good news that put an entire division of the Japanese army in a tight siege?

Okamura not only knew that the 106th Division was besieged in Leimingguliu, but also felt very "surprised and saddened". Name of officer above captain.Okamura believes that the captured Japanese soldiers must have leaked the truth. He was right and wrong.It was very difficult for Japanese soldiers to be captured on the battlefield, but once they were captured, and they knew that they would be treated better, they usually knew everything and said everything.This is in great contrast to the U.S. captives in World War II. The U.S. military allows soldiers to surrender when the battle is unfavorable and desperate, but they will teach the soldiers what are the points that can be confessed in advance, so they can definitely be neither humble nor overbearing when they are interrogated , To deal with Yuru, it seems that everything has been said, but in fact, you will not be allowed to get any valuable information.

What Okamura guessed wrong is that there are so many numbers and names, it is impossible for them all to come from captives.The reason is very simple, how can a low-level soldier know so much information, it is good for him to know the number of his squadron and the name of the squadron leader, at most he can tell others, what is the name of the division commander. The real reason is that the Japanese army in the early days of World War II was very careless about secrecy.After Tang Yongliang, a war reporter from Chongqing also visited Wanjialing on the way.At that time, he also saw many broken documents and books in the hut that used to be the command post of the Japanese army.After the war, Xue Yue’s chief of staff wrote a memoir about the Battle of Wanjialing, which disclosed the details of the 106th Division of the Japanese Army in large sections. The usage, requirements, and battle examples of poison gas warfare are not omitted.Obviously, these materials should come from the large amount of confidential documents seized.

At that time, Miyazaki could no longer care about these issues. What he was worried about was how to prevent the 106th Division from being completely annihilated. After dawn, Miyazaki sent a large number of planes to carry out the rescue.From sunrise to sunset, groups of planes circled over Wanjialing to assist in the battle. The number of them was so large that it was rarely seen during the entire Anti-Japanese War.Although the bombs dropped by the Japanese planes were all small bombs of several tens of pounds, they would drop more than a dozen or even dozens of them at a time.A military officer described on the phone: "The bombs of the Japanese devils were not dropped from the planes, but fell down in a basket."

Under the cover of the Japanese aircraft, Matsuura and his remnants were able to break through to Zhangshuao.Some Chinese generals who participated in the war wrote poems for him: "Ma Ling, Pang Zi will not escape; Hua Rong, Ah Man is lucky to survive!" At this time, it is not only Miyazaki who needs to worry about the 106th Division.After the Wanjialing battle was disclosed by the media, the Japanese ruling and opposition parties were shocked.As the superior of the Japanese Eleventh Army, Commander Hata Shunroku of the "Central China Dispatch Army" had no choice but to directly intervene in the rescue operation.In addition to directly airdropping more than 200 officers below the regimental commander to Wanjialing, they also organized and dispatched three detachments, under the unified command of Major General Suzuki Harumatsu, to rescue the besieged Japanese troops.