"The water of the Yellow River rises from the sky and flows to the sea and never returns", Li Bai's "Will Enter the Wine" describes the rushing and surging water of the Yellow River to the fullest.
As the mother river of our country, the Yellow River has always fed hundreds of millions of Chinese sons and daughters and the land of China, but with the tragic human-made Yellow River breach on June 9, 1938, the water that was then called the source of life has been transformed into a source of all evils.
In this choppy and turbulent garden mouth breach, chinese soldiers and civilians suffered as many as a million casualties and displaced millions of people, which is three times the number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre.
After the Huayuankou embankment broke, it indirectly caused the Great Famine in Henan in 1942, and in this shocking and appalling famine, 1.5 million people died and as many as 12 million people were affected.
So how did the most tragic scene in the history of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression come about? When the garden mouth breaks the embankment, is it right or wrong for Chiang Kai-shek to replace the soldiers with water? Why did the Huayuankou embankment directly lead to the Great Famine in Henan? How many Japanese kooks drowned after the Yellow River burst its banks?
On the battlefield of the Anti-Japanese War on March 16, 1938, the national contingent finally stopped being defeated repeatedly as it was then, and after more than a month of bloody fighting, under the leadership of Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi, Tang Enbo and others, it finally defeated the arrogant Japanese Kou, and even broke the myth that the so-called "Japanese army is invincible".
After ushering in the great victory of the Battle of Taierzhuang, both for the people of the whole country and for Chiang Kai-shek, the ruling Nationalist government at that time, it was even more determined and confident in the War of Resistance.
Under such circumstances, Chiang Kai-shek changed his original anti-Japanese strategy, no longer did not actively resist Japan as before, but changed his previous attitude and began to vigorously advocate the theory of rapid victory.
There is no doubt that the victory of Taierzhuang made Chiang Kai-shek see the dawn of victory, and after issuing an order to the 200,000 Central Army to turn to the Xuzhou battlefield, Chiang Kai-shek, who was confident at that time, decided to try to fight with the Japanese to determine victory or defeat.
However, the Japanese were never fools, and in the face of such a large-scale military operation by the Nationalist government, they quickly attracted the attention of the Japanese commanders, so they hurriedly ordered the transfer of 300,000 Japanese Kou to Xuzhou, and this well-equipped 300,000 tiger and wolf division, after launching a huge attack on Xuzhou, Chiang Kai-shek's so-called "quick battle and quick decision" strategy was stillborn.
In order to preserve his strength, Chiang Kai-shek decided to withdraw his troops and leave Xuzhou, and on May 19, 1938, the Japanese army completely captured Xuzhou, and the prestige of the Japanese army for a while shocked the national generals, so that the general Gui Yongqing of the Nationalist army who was firmly defending Lanfeng at that time and Huang Jie of Shangqiu collapsed in full line after only one day of garrisoning the position, resulting in the fall of lanfeng and shangqiu cities one after another.
After hearing that his subordinates had fled in a hurry, Chiang Kai-shek, who had personally flown to Zhengzhou earlier, was even more angry: The Battle of Lanfeng was the first laughing stock in the history of war.
After the fall of Kaifeng, the Japanese army continued to attack west along the Longhai line, the Zhengzhou crisis, Wuhan was shaken, if Zhengzhou also fell one after another, this means that Wuhan behind Zhengzhou must not be protected.
The strategic importance of Shaanxi to the west of Wuhan and Hebei to the north is self-evident, and if Zhengzhou is lost, the result must be unimaginable, even Chiang Kai-shek, who is the president of the Republic of China, does not dare to bear this price easily.
In order to resist the victorious Japanese army, Chiang Kai-shek, after thinking about it repeatedly, still made a decision that had never been done before or since--blowing up the yellow river embankment, replacing the troops with water, and vainly trying to suppress the Japanese.
Kenji Toihara, who had earlier discovered the Kuomintang's attempt through reconnaissance planes, did not obstruct Chiang Kai-shek's decision, because in his eyes, there were countless emperors who ruled the Yellow River Valley for more than 2,500 years, but none of them dared to destroy the yellow river embankment, and Chiang Kai-shek did not dare to do so.
However, he always overestimated Chiang Kai-shek's moral bottom line, and after repeated consultations with his subordinates, Chiang Kai-shek weighed and decided to blow up the Yellow River, and after two days and two nights of continuous excavation, on June 9, 1938, in order to prevent the Japanese army from committing crimes in the west, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the explosion of the garden mouth and the replacement of water for soldiers.
After the Garden Mouth breach, the water of the Yellow River is really like "heaven up", pouring down the Jialu River rapidly, and the place where the Garden Mouth breaks the embankment is instantly engulfed by the water, and the overflowing water slopes towards southeast Henan.
According to incomplete statistics, henan people's houses were washed away more than 1.4 million homes, more than 8 million mu of cultivated land was submerged, more than 11 million mu of cultivated land in Anhui and Jiangsu were flooded, and more than 4.8 million people lost their homes.
More than 800,000 people were drowned without knowing it, all of them buried in the belly of fish, more than 300,000 square kilometers of the Yellow River flooding area, thousands of people displaced and homeless.
The indirect result of the bursting of the embankment at the mouth of the Garden, the great diversion of the Yellow River led to the Great Famine in Henan in 1942, and the well-flooded fertile lands of eastern Henan, central Henan, northern Anhui and northern Jiangsu began to be seriously desertified and alkalized, becoming a yellow pan area with no grass, coupled with the displacement of tens of millions of people, uncultured grain, desertification of the land, and annual harvest failures, which lasted until 1942, which completely broke out of the Henan famine.
As many as 3 million people were killed in the famine, tens of millions of people became homeless refugees, and the phenomenon of changing children and eating was often and tragic, and its impact was far more than the famine of the 1940s, but also directly included the yellow pan area of the 60s.
In the midst of the great famine in 1942, although there were frozen bones on the side of the road, the wine and flesh of Zhumen were always smelly, so Chiang Kai-shek, who was in Zhumen, after blowing up the mouth of the Yellow River, his strategy of substituting water for soldiers could really stop the pace of the Japanese attack?
After the garden mouth broke the embankment, the water of the Yellow River naturally formed a natural barrier, making the Japanese Kou insurmountable east of the new Yellow River, and destroying the Japanese strategy of trying to attack Wuhan in the north and south.
Although the huayuankou embankment broke the embankment to win precious time for the defense of Wuhan, after the gushing Yellow River, Zhengzhou and Wuhan still fell one after another, which just shows that "replacing the army with water" cannot completely stop the enemy, let alone win the war.
This time, Chiang Kai-shek's strategy of "breaking the yellow river embankment and replacing the soldiers with water" drowned as many as 900,000 people overnight, and the japanese Kou who were finally wiped out by this man-made scourge were only 2,000 people killed because of the flood, and the wounded and dead caused by the flood were about 7,000 people.
Compared with the casualties of our Chinese people, the so-called "water instead of soldiers" is so ironic, the death of 890,000 Chinese sons and daughters, but only in exchange for the death of more than 7,000 Japanese Koso.
After blowing up the Garden Mouth, chiang kai-shek's dictator, in order to evade responsibility and the scorn of the people, began to hype the Yellow River embankment blown up by Japanese aircraft, and from Chiang Kai-shek's move, it is not difficult for us to see that as the initiator, he never dared to admit it, and Chiang Kai-shek knew in his heart that if he admitted this incident, then he would be forever nailed to the column of shame of history.
The right or wrong of the garden mouth breach has always been the wisdom of the benevolent and the wise, and from the standpoint of thousands of ordinary people, this must be a wrong decision-making event, which has caused the displacement of millions of people.
More than a decade after the Huayuankou embankment broke, in the grand Huaihai Campaign that broke out near the Huangpan Area, millions of people in the Central Plains clearly expressed their positions with their hands and carts.
But if you look at it from a strategic point of view, it is undoubtedly successful, after the break of the embankment, let Japan completely abandon the strategic policy of "fighting from north to south", if the Garden Mouth is not blown up, the Japanese army is bound to go south on a large scale, cross the river and enter the two lakes, after this, if the Japanese army takes advantage of the situation to directly attack Wuhan, then all the main forces of China's anti-Japanese resistance will be surrounded and annihilated by the Japanese army, once the main force is annihilated, China really has no hope to confront Japan.
The incident of breaking the embankment at the mouth of the garden with water instead of soldiers will always be a history that the sons and daughters of the Central Plains will never forget, and this flying disaster indirectly reflects the fact that China was weak and powerless at that time.