Chapter 58 to break out

The terrain in northern Hunan is the same as that in northern Jiangxi. It is dominated by mountains and lakes. In addition, the ninth war zone will completely destroy the roads in every battle, making mechanized and motorized arms basically useless. The only ones that can increase the speed of movement of the Japanese army are cavalry. . In the Battle of Northern Hunan, the Japanese cavalry gave full play to its surprise attack role.When fighting against the Tenth Army belonging to the Chinese Ninth Theater, the cavalry regiment of the Japanese Eleventh Army took a rugged trail and launched a night attack on the frontmost battalion of the Tenth Division of the Tenth Chinese Army.The officers and soldiers of the battalion were snoring and sleeping in the camp, when the Japanese cavalry charged in and hacked and killed two or three hundred people overnight with knives, causing the Tenth Division to be in chaos.

In addition to raiding the front-line troops, the cavalry also targeted the Chinese command organization.The dispatch of the first army depends entirely on the command. Once the command organization is raided and the communication is destroyed, the command intention cannot be issued. When the army has no leader, it often encounters the enemy and has no intention of fighting, so it can only retreat blindly. It was the brigade of Japanese cavalry that attacked Huanghua Town.At that time, Wang Yaowu was negotiating with Lieutenant General Gao Shen and Shen Jiuzheng, who was dispatched by the Commander's Department of the war zone, to discuss the retreat.The troops directly under the army were dispersed immediately. Seeing the approach of the Japanese army, Wang Yaowu and Shen Jiuzheng hurried into the woods beside the road.

Wang Yaowu's platoon of guards sacrificed their lives to cover it. The platoon leader of the guards was hacked to death by the Japanese cavalry with sabers, and Wang Yaowu himself was only a few steps away. The night was cloudy and moonless, and it was dark. There were advantages and disadvantages for the breakouts. The biggest disadvantage was that they did not know the direction and did not know which correct path to retreat.After the headquarters of the 51st Division was dispersed, Li Tianxia and her staff were forced to break through separately.Li Tianxia had guards by her side, so the situation was relatively better, and ordinary staff officers could only rely on their own luck.Huang Youheng, a staff member of the division staff office, held a pistol and carried a briefcase on his back, and climbed up a hill covered with bushes. The voices of Japanese soldiers talking, eating and asking passwords were heard from the village below the mountain, but he did not dare to go down the mountain casually. .

Huang Youheng waited until dawn and sunrise, when he could see the direction to the south clearly, then Huang Youheng set off.After walking for more than ten miles, he ate something at a farmhouse and burned all the briefcase, including the documents and bags.Because he knew that he was not completely out of danger, the only way to prevent important documents from falling into the hands of the Japanese army. Sure enough, when approaching the Liuyang River, Huang Youheng encountered the Japanese army again. He wanted to climb the mountain to avoid it, but it was too late.Two Japanese soldiers followed closely behind and failed to hit him twice with bayonets. Huang Youheng jumped down the steep slope, then ran to the Liuyang River, and jumped into the river desperately to swim south.

The Japanese army fired several shots on the shore, and Huang Youheng dived into the water in a hurry. The Japanese army thought he was shot and sank, so they stopped firing. After Huang Youheng climbed to the south bank, he went through untold hardships to reach the north of Liuyang City.The deputy division commander Zhou Zhidao is already containing the troops, and the division commander Li Tianxia has also arrived at the south bank of the Liuyang River and is setting up a defense line to cover the entire army to contain them. During this entire army retreat, the situation of the 51st Division was not bad. Most of the regiments, battalions, and company commanders controlled one or several troops in the chaos, and they all brought the troops back.Among them, the artillery battalion is the best preserved. Liu Bingjun, the deputy commander of the battalion, returned to search for each company and fired at the pursuing enemy with fierce artillery fire.Under the unknown situation, the enemy did not bite and pursue, so that the artillery battalion returned safely without any loss.After the war, Wang Yaowu gave a speech in the 51st Division and praised Liu Bingjun in public for his calmness, wit and bravery in the face of powerful enemies.

Among the three divisions, the fifty-seventh and fifty-eighth divisions suffered the most.The 57th Division suffered 40% casualties, and the 58th Division suffered even more serious injuries. Eighty-five officers were killed in battle, and 148 were wounded or missing. The total casualty rate was close to half of the officers and soldiers who participated in the battle. The broken halberd at Chunhua Mountain was one of the few defeats in the history of the Seventy-Fourth Army.Although they were defeated and retreated, they still showed their true colors as an iron army. Not only did they wipe out a considerable number of Japanese troops, but also because of their effective containment, they left Anan with the biggest hidden danger behind him-Pingjiang.

On September 28, the Japanese army occupied Changsha, and on September 29 they captured Zhuzhou. On October 1, Anan believed that he had achieved his goal and ordered a northward retreat along the original offensive road.At this time, Yang Sen commanded the 20th Army and other departments to fight out from Pingjiang, carrying out side attacks, tail attacks, and blocking attacks, which caused the Japanese army to suffer a lot of casualties and seized a large number of horses, guns, and ammunition. The main reason for the "Second Great Victory in Northern Hunan".Afterwards, Isamu Kinoshita, chief of staff of the Japanese Eleventh Army, wrote in his diary: "The commander of the Anan Army believed that not occupying Pingjiang was a major mistake of the army."

During the retreat of the Japanese army, the Chinese Ninth War Zone launched a full-line pursuit, and the 74th Army was also among them. However, the so-called pursuit of "recovering" lost ground after the Japanese army was exhausted did not rely on opportunism. For the heroic troops who come to gain honor and military exploits, it doesn't have much practical significance, they just follow orders. When Wang Yaowu received the order to deploy the pursuit, he didn't know where Liao Lingqi, the commander of the 58th Division, was now. Therefore, the 58th Division did not pursue the pursuit with the 51st and 57th Divisions.

Liao Lingqi did not disappear during the battle, which means that the possibility of death or capture is unlikely, but it is very likely that he fled to the rear.This kind of thing was not uncommon in the Anti-Japanese War, but it was unimaginable to happen to the Seventy-Fourth Army. Wang Yaowu hurriedly called the Minister's Department to investigate, and the investigation results were ridiculous.