Chapter 99 Gun Sniffing Team

What Banxi meant was to organize the formation, as if a person punches, retracts his fist first, and then punches out.Unexpectedly, the 58th Brigade of the Japanese Army was exhausted long ago. As soon as they received the order, the westward troops could not wait to start retreating that night, and because the overall command and mutual communication could not keep up, an almost unorganized retreat was formed. . The 115th Battalion of the Japanese Army stationed in Wuyang was the first to break away from the main force, and was immediately wiped out by the 5th Division of the Chinese 94th Army, which was rushing towards Wugang.The 117th Battalion to the east of Wuyang was also surrounded. They didn't know that the 115th Battalion had been wiped out, and they even asked for help by radio.

With great difficulty, the 117th Battalion broke free from the encirclement, and rushed towards Huayuan City together with other troops. The Chinese Fifth Division had long anticipated the direction in which the Japanese army might break out of the siege, and cut off its retreat west of Huayuan City in advance.The retreating troops of the Japanese army did not dare to take the main road, so they had to retreat eastward along the rugged mountain road, and all the supplies such as mules, horses, artillery, etc. were also abandoned. On May 7, the 44th Division that drove to Wugang City arrived at the outskirts of Wugang City, and together with the city defenders, attacked the besieging Japanese army.The Japanese army besieging the city had been exhausted for a long time, and after being flanked, they retreated without support, and the siege of Wugang was relieved.

A small number of broken Japanese troops fled into the deep mountains and old forests in disorder.Some of these guys went to the village at night to steal food to satisfy their hunger, and some threw away their guns and wore stolen clothes, trying to disguise themselves as ordinary people and wait for an opportunity to escape. It was inconvenient for the army to send a large force into the mountain to search, so they asked the township offices to organize the search and arrest, and stipulated that each captured person would be rewarded with 10,000 French currency.When the Japanese army attacked, they burned, killed and looted the residents of Wugang. The local people hated them so much that they would not let them go even if they didn't give them bonuses.After receiving the order, the townships organized a military search of the mountain, and successively captured more than ten Japanese soldiers and sent them to Wugang.

When the Japanese prisoners were escorted to Wugang City, the citizens rushed to watch.These Japanese prisoners all bowed their heads and looked sad, and one of the soldiers was still wearing black lace trousers that they had snatched.A second lieutenant officer was a graduate of Meiji University in Japan. When he was being interrogated, he wrote the words "It's all over" with a pen, and then kept silent, expressing his despair and pessimism. On the evening of May 7, the 120th Regiment and the 133rd Regiment of the Japanese Army's 116th Division in Eguchi withdrew from their original positions one by one. Before they withdrew, the 109th Regiment had advanced leave one day.

One day earlier was because Division Chief Hishida expected that the 109th Regiment would have the greatest difficulty in withdrawing and leaving. In addition to deliberately advancing one day earlier, he also ordered the rescue brigade and other departments to respond to the 109th Regiment again. The rescue brigade sent by the 133rd Regiment has never been able to catch up with the 109th Regiment since its dispatch, but its own troops have dropped from a thousand to a few hundred.They were ordered to respond again, but they couldn't even defeat the local Yao Self-Defense Forces. The folk customs in western Hunan are aggressive, and most of the people have weapons, but there are few rifles, most of which are blunderbusses for hunting wild boars.There are more than 30 people in the self-defense team of the Yao nationality. At first, there were only two or three long and short guns, and the rest were all bird guns.When shooting with bird guns, the shooter seems to sniff the gun lightly on the nose, and the muzzle can emit smoke with a bang, so they call the bird guns "sniffing guns", and the Self-Defense Forces are also called "sniffing guns". It's "Gun Sniffing Team."

If you compete with the Japanese for real materials, the "sniffing gun" is obviously not enough.The Self-Defense Forces adopted guerrilla-style attack tactics, that is, a group of two or three people lay in ambush among the grass and brambles, and opened fire on the Japanese soldiers on the road like wild boars.If "Wild Boar" was a scattered Japanese soldier, he would be unlucky, and the team members would be able to hand over the rifles they liked. If there were more Japanese soldiers and they had already found out where they were, they would run away after shooting.These self-defense members lived in the dense forests of high mountains since they were young. They ran up and down the mountains like flying, like walking on flat ground, and the Japanese army could not catch up at all.

On May 7, Lan Chunda, captain of the self-defense force, sent Liu Dongsheng out of the mountain to conduct reconnaissance. Unexpectedly, he was caught by soldiers of the Japanese rescue team as soon as he came out of the mountain. Liu Dongsheng was young and not tall. After being captured by the Japanese army, he cried desperately, saying that he was looking for his father.The Japanese army has always killed people like hemp, and they will not let go of the Chinese who appear in this situation, but it may be that they hope to learn something from Liu Dongsheng, or let him lead the way, so they did not kill him immediately, but sent him locked in a house.

Liu Dongsheng is a child of a monkey spirit.That night, he escaped from the house and went into the mountain to report to Lan Chunda. After mastering the enemy's situation, Lan Chunda concentrated all the rifles and birdcages, and using the cover of trees and grass, he commanded the team to slowly approach the Japanese army. Following Lan Chunda's signal, the team members fired together from all directions.The Japanese soldiers were caught off guard. Some fell to the ground on the spot, and some were hit by blunderbusses. Although they could not die for a while, their bodies were covered with bullets, which could not be peeled off or pulled out. They screamed in pain.

In this blocking battle, no less than a hundred Japanese soldiers were injured, 13 Japanese soldiers were killed, and the Self-Defense Forces seized eight 38 large caps.The frightened rescue brigade had to temporarily abandon the response plan and retreat hastily.