Chapter 42 haunted

In the early hours of December 16, the mortar artillery began to conduct test firings.Through two test firings, the artillery corrected the shooting direction and range, and also obtained the correct data of shooting elements. With a command of "ready-release", the mortar shell flew out of the barrel with a "bang" and exploded at the intended target location.A squadron of the 214th Regiment of the 34th Division of the Japanese Army was stationed at Xiaoling. They were conducting morning lectures. They never expected that the attacking troops would start shelling at this time, and they had no time to find a place to hide.

After a single shell hits, it is a continuous fire.The shells fell one after another like hail, the flames flickered on the forward position, and the smoke column billowed.As soon as the artillery fire extended its range, the 169th Regiment of the 57th Division launched a charge and wiped out all the more than 200 Japanese troops in Xiaoling with swift movements. On the same day, the 58th Division also launched a fierce attack on the Shaguling position that hindered its advance.Liao Lingqi, deputy commander of the division, personally commanded the 37mm flat-firing gun to support the infantry's charge. The two battalions of the 174th Regiment attacked from both sides, and wiped out about 200 people from a squadron of the 214th Company of the Japanese Army.

Unlike the 169th Regiment who attacked Xiaoling by surprise attack, so the casualties were relatively small. The 174th Regiment basically attacked by force. If the results declared by the troops were not mixed with any water, such a casualty ratio between the enemy and the enemy was already very cost-effective at the time. After the 58th Division conquered Shaguling, Luo Zhuoying called other troops to take over the defense and let the 58th Division continue to attack.At this time, a mixed infantry brigade of the Japanese army attempted to recapture Shaguling. The 58th Division, for the sake of the friendly army, continued to stay and fight until the Japanese counterattack was repelled, and they did not let the friendly army enter the position to take defense.After getting the report, Luo Zhuoying praised him very much, and specially asked the Military Commission to give Liao Lingqi a great service.

The style of play adopted by the 51st Division is different from that of the two brother divisions.In addition to strengthening the face-to-face offensive, the division commander Li Tianxia also organized two detachments to gallop behind the enemy's rear with the reinforced battalion as a unit to destroy and contain the Japanese army. On December 29, Liu Guangyu's detachment rushed into the rear maintenance meeting, burned down two Japanese warehouses and communication agencies, and then calmly withdrew. As soon as he succeeded, the Seventy-Fourth Army saw the weakness of the opponent.In fact, since the launch of the winter offensive, the 34th Division of the Japanese Army has been sticking to the turtle-shell tactics. By the end of December, even knowing that the outlying strongholds were constantly under siege, the main force stationed in Fengxin did not dare to send troops out of the city to rescue them. Rely on their own strength to defend each stronghold.

If you don't come out, then we'll go in. On December 31, Wang Junru's detachment of the 51st Division suddenly attacked Fengxin at night.Taking advantage of the negligence of the Japanese army's security, the detachment rushed in from Fengxin's west gate and north gate, and wiped out most of the security troops with machine guns and grenades.Subsequently, Wang Junru ordered to blow up two Japanese mountain artillery in the north of the city with grenades, and burned down two military warehouses outside the west gate. The 34th Division of the Japanese Army never thought that the Chinese army would dare to touch its lair, and hurriedly mobilized the defenders on the outskirts of Fengxin City to come back for reinforcements.Wang Junru's detachment was flanked during the retreat, and the return route was cut off and surrounded.The 3rd Battalion of the 152nd Regiment went to the rescue. The officers and soldiers braved the hail of bullets and rushed into the enemy's line, desperately rescuing the brothers who were trapped in the siege. The battalion commander Wang Jingyin died in the battle because of this, but the battalion finally helped Wang Junru's detachment to escape safely.

In January 1940, the Ninth Theater ordered the winter offensive to end.During the entire offensive, the Seventy-Fourth Army suffered the most losses and made the greatest contribution to the entire offensive.It was their elusive raid tactics that forced the 34th Division of the Japanese Army to abandon the secondary stronghold on the outskirts of Fengxin City and shrink its troops to Fengxin City to hold on.As a result, the depth of Fengxin's city defenses became narrower, and most of its flanking areas were controlled by the Chinese army, which could no longer constitute a complete defensive position.Soon, Fengxin was recovered by the Ninth Army in one fell swoop.

As one of the American military observers most familiar with the situation in China at the time, Carlson recognized the value of guerrilla warfare as early as the end of the Songhu Battle, believing that it could effectively make up for the lack of regular warfare.With the successive fall of Nanjing and Wuhan, the Military Commission began to pay more and more attention to the role of guerrilla warfare. Chiang Kai-shek even accepted the suggestion of the CCP for the first time, and opened the "Nanyue Guerrilla Cadre Training Course" in Hengyang, Hunan Province, specializing in the training of guerrilla tactics.The winter offensive was actually a grand exercise of guerrilla tactics. Although it made little breakthrough in regaining lost ground and annihilating the number of enemies, it achieved the purpose of harassment to the greatest extent.During the offensive, the Nanxun Railway was closed to traffic for two months, and the Japanese army relied entirely on waterways for supplies.After the offensive was over, the engineering sabotage team left behind by the Nineteenth Group Army continued to harass the Japanese traffic, and more than 20 kilometers of the Nanxun Road railroad track alone were destroyed.

Encouraged by the effectiveness of the winter offensive, the Military Commission planned to launch a larger offensive in the summer of 1940 once it had completed replenishment of troops.The tactical principle of the summer offensive was still the same as that of the winter offensive, that is, to use regular field troops to cooperate with guerrilla forces to carry out large-scale harassment of the enemy's rear in order to consume the combat power of the Japanese army. All of a sudden, guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines became the new darling of strategic planning, but objectively speaking, on the frontal battlefield, guerrilla tactics can only be used as an auxiliary to regular warfare—if the Japanese army is completely attracted by guerrilla warfare, they will break up their field troops into pieces However, if we remain unmoved and continue to launch medium-scale main battles, the living space and will of the Chinese guerrilla warfare will be severely suppressed .

As a first-class tactical master of the Japanese command, Okamura has done in-depth research on this.He believes that under the same conditions, the combat quality of the Chinese army is far inferior to that of the Japanese army. The reason why the Japanese army was able to overwhelm the Japanese army during the winter offensive and was busy parrying, to put it bluntly, is because of the large number of people. The Japanese army was more than ten times larger. what to do?Okamura's approach is to concentrate the use of troops.This move was very ruthless. Two years later, when Okamura went to North China, it was this method that brought the Eighth Route Army's guerrilla warfare to an all-round low ebb.