This year marks the 76th anniversary of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and looking back on that arduous history, countless revolutionary martyrs and anti-Japanese soldiers shed their own blood and paid for their lives on the anti-Japanese battlefield for the benefit of the country and the nation. After more than ten years of arduous resistance, the Japanese invaders were finally completely defeated and driven out of China.
On the anti-Japanese battlefield, there were both the regular Kuomintang troops armed with sophisticated weapons, as well as the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army, which carried out guerrilla resistance in the base areas behind enemy lines. There are also scattered anti-Japanese armed forces hidden in the civilian population. Whether they were holding advanced firearms or large swords and spears, as long as they were aimed at the Japanese invaders, they were anti-Japanese heroes. It is precisely because of these heroes and martyrs of the Anti-Japanese Resistance who have succeeded us that we have today's peaceful and prosperous world.
At that time, many people in China thought that fighting a war was a matter for soldiers, and only the regular army could be regarded as a real anti-Japanese resistance, but in fact, in addition to the regular army of the Kuomintang, there were many anti-Japanese forces that contributed greatly to the final victory of the War of Resistance.
In the Battle of Yuxianggui, there was a force composed of bandits who fought alone with the Japanese Kou. In the end, the Japanese army was severely damaged, thousands of Japanese troops were killed, and a miracle in the history of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was created.
The story takes place in May 1944, when World War II was drawing to a close and Japanese fascism was already in a state of incapacitation.
Japan is a small island country, itself does not have much energy, although the industry is very developed, but the large-scale war required energy consumption far exceeds the expectations of the Japanese militarists.
Therefore, they need to plunder more energy from the occupied territories to sustain this protracted war.
Japan originally planned to develop Tohoku into its own strategic rear, and Japan's mineral exploration experts agreed that the Tohoku region must be rich in oil resources. However, after several years of arduous exploration, the Japanese never drilled oil in the northeast land, and finally had to give up.
In fact, the Japanese have found the Daqing oil field, and their drilling is less than a hundred meters away from the oil field.
It was also because the Japanese did not find the blood of the war in tohoku--- oil. So they set their sights on Southeast Asia, which was a British and Dutch colony.
Not only have Indonesia and Malaysia proven to have rich oil reserves, but the British and Dutch have operated here for many years, with a mature oil extraction and refining industry. Therefore, Japan is eager to take Southeast Asia for itself.
There are two routes to Southeast Asia, one is by sea, through the South China Sea, through the Strait of Malacca to Malaysia. But japan had lost control of the Pacific, and American submarines were often infested in the western Pacific, posing a huge threat to Japanese maritime transport ships. There is simply no way to secure energy transport from the sea.
Another way is to open up the road passage from Chinese mainland to Southeast Asia, and transport southeast Asian oil to the Chinese battlefield and northeast China by train.
Once this passage is opened, Japan will once again have access to vital resources to sustain the war and continue this criminal war. Therefore, the Japanese launched the infamous Battle of Yuxianggui.
The starting point of this battle was in Henan, in Luoyang.
The Japanese gathered heavy troops to attack Luoyang, and the 15th Army and the 94th Division of the National Revolutionary Army were responsible for defending Luoyang.
This Fifteenth Army is not very famous, they are not Chiang Kai-shek's concubine Central Army, and they are not even a regular national army.
The predecessor of the Fifteenth Army was the Zhensong Army in the western part of Henan, which was very famous in Henan, Hebei, and Shanxi. Ostensibly it was an army, but in fact the main members were bandits.
They have robbed homes, dug graves, oppressed the people, and run amok in the north of China, and have done many bad things. Therefore, the reputation of this armed force is not too good, and ordinary people see the Zhensong Army like seeing tigers, wolves and beasts, scattering and fleeing.
In that era of warlord chaos, whoever had more people and more guns could seize the next piece of territory and become the hegemon of one side. The Zhensong army was no exception, gradually forming a large force in Henan, and often fighting back and forth with other warlords.
During the Great War of the Central Plains, the Zhensong army and the major warlords fought in a scuffle, and as a result, they were beaten to the ground, and they had no choice but to defect to Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang Kai-shek was just about to recruit troops, so he incorporated this group of bandits under his command and reorganized them into the Eleventh Army and the Fifteenth Army.
So the Zhensong Army, from the original local bandits, turned around and put on the uniform of the Nationalist Army and became a veritable National Revolutionary Army. The leader of the Zhensong Army was named Liu Zhenhua, a tyrant in Henan, who was originally very capable. But the man later suffered from mental illness, moody, and unable to lead the army.
Therefore, Chiang Kai-shek appointed Liu Zhenhua's younger brother Liu Mao'en to take his place as commander of the Fifteenth Army.
This Liu Mao'en is not a simple person, although he is from the green forest, he still has a very good set of leading soldiers to fight. And he hated the Japanese to the bone and was very active in the anti-Japanese battlefield.
Chiang Kai-shek appointed him commander-in-chief of the 14th Army, commanding four main armies to fight the Japanese, and the famous Whampoa general Fan Hanjie also fought under his 14th Army. But later Chiang Kai-shek repeatedly reduced Liu Mao'en's forces, and only his Fifteenth Army and a provisional Fourth Army were left.
Although the Fifteenth Army was born of banditry, under the leadership of Liu Mao'en, it never flinched in fighting the Japanese. In several major battles in the Central Plains, the Fifteenth Army was present.
Liu Mao'en led the Fifteenth Army to a decisive battle with the Japanese at Zhongtiao Mountain, but fell into a heavy siege, and finally he was ready to die with the enemy, just at this time when it was raining heavily and the Japanese army could not attack. Liu Mao'en took the opportunity to lead his troops out of the encirclement circle, which saved his life in danger.
Due to the unusually bravery of the Fifteenth Army, the Japanese army was also extremely impressed by this unit.
Although Chiang Kai-shek was accustomed to the trick of killing people with a knife, he hoped that this miscellaneous army would be weakened or even destroyed by the Japanese on the anti-Japanese battlefield. However, Liu Mao'en always escaped with this unit, and continued to grow, and the backbone of the unit was all Liu Mao'en's cronies, vowing to follow him to the death to fight the Japanese devils.
In March 1944, the Japanese army launched the Battle of Yuxianggui, the infamous "No. 1 Battle Plan", and their strategic goal was to open up the Chinese mainland lines of communication.
The commander-in-chief of the Japanese North China Front, Okamura Ningji, mobilized nearly 100,000 elite Japanese troops and attacked the hinterland of Henan in three ways. In order to cope with the Japanese attack and save Henan, the Central Military Commission of the Nationalist Government mobilized more than 400,000 troops to form 8 group armies in Henan to block the Japanese army's southward advance.
The top commanders of the Nationalist side were Tang Enbo and Jiang Dingwen.
Although the number of the Nationalist army far exceeded that of the Japanese army, the weapons and equipment were backward, the quality of the soldiers was low, and the will to fight was not strong, so at the beginning of the battle, the Nationalist army was defeated all the way.
Many strategic places in Henan Province fell one after another, and Zhengzhou, Xuchang, And Haocheng fell into the hands of the Japanese. The Japanese soon took control of the southern route of the Pinghan Railway, and then they expanded along the railway line to both sides, and a large area of territory fell into Japanese hands.
The situation on the battlefield was completely under the control of Okamura Ninji, and although the Nationalist army made full preparations and struggled to resist, it was not an opponent of the Japanese army at all. Soon after the engagement, the main force of the Nationalist army retreated to western Henan.
At this time, Okamura's goal was not just a strategic place along the Pinghan Railway. He set his sights on luoyang, the seat of the First Theater Headquarters of the National Revolutionary Army, the heart of Henan.
The main force of the Japanese army then began to march toward Luoyang, and the situation on the battlefield plummeted, and Luoyang, as the command center, was also panicked and fell into chaos. At this time, the top brass of the Kuomintang army was not actively preparing for war, but was trying to escape from Luoyang.
These people who fled westward were bombarded by Japanese aircraft on the road, killing and wounding countless people.
Moreover, Jiang Dingwen, the commander-in-chief of the First Theater, appeared timid at this time, very afraid of fighting with the Japanese, and he began to plan how to escape from Luoyang.
The speed of the Japanese attack exceeded the expectations of the Nationalist army, Longmen was the gateway to the south of Luoyang, and when the Japanese army suddenly appeared outside the Longmen position, the Nationalist army was not fully prepared.
Although the Longmen defenders struggled to resist by virtue of their terrain advantages, after two days and nights of fighting, the Nationalist army ran out of ammunition and food, and the Longmen fell. The gate to Luoyang from the south was opened.
On the day of the fall of the Dragon Gate, Jiang Dingwen fled from Luoyang, and on the way to escape, his guards were scattered, and Jiang Dingwen was almost captured alive by the Japanese army, which was extremely embarrassing.
On May 9, the Japanese army occupied Shichi and Xin'an, and Luoning, Yichuan, Songxian, Yanshi, and Mengjin also fell one after another, forming a closed siege of Luoyang.
After the Japanese occupied Longmen, they quickly marched to both sides of Luoyang, and the strategic strongholds on the east, west and north sides of Luoyang were also conquered by the Japanese. The Japanese army formed a siege of Luoyang, and the situation was extremely critical.
At this time, sitting in Luoyang was Chiang Kai-shek's beloved general Tang Enbo, but he also felt that he could not hold on. So he ordered Luoyang to be held by Wu Tinglin, commander of the 15th Army, and the 94th Division was also under the unified command of Wu Tinglin. Tang Enbo then fled from Luoyang City in a hurry.
The commanders have run away, can the soldiers still hold their positions? The Central Army can run, and soldiers from other places can also run, but the Fifteenth Army is a native of Henan, and if they run, they are equivalent to throwing their hometown and fathers and fellow villagers to the Japanese with their own hands.
Although they were born as bandits and knew that their reputation was not good, the Japanese had bullied them to the doorstep of their homes, and they could not be breeders at this time. There was no other way, picked up the gun and fought with them.
With the encouragement of Wu Tinglin, the bandits of the Fifteenth Army inspired an unprecedented will to fight.
At the same time, they fought alongside a 94th Division, which was not Chiang Kai-shek's central army, they were the famous Sichuan army.
The Sichuan army was not the most capable of fighting at that time, but it was definitely the hardest bone, and they were thousands of miles out of Sichuan to resist Japan, and they were the most famous local anti-war army during the War of Resistance.
All the officers and men of the 94th Division fought against the enemy and swore to defend luoyang city together with the fifteenth army, and vowed to coexist and die with Luoyang.
Wu Tinglin was the first general under Liu Mao'en, and after Liu Mao'en was promoted to commander-in-chief of the 14th Group Army, he handed over the 15th Army to Wu Tinglin.
Wu Tinglin, like Liu Mao'en, was an iron-boned man who never flinched in a war with the Japanese.
After Tang Enbo escaped, Wu Tinglin immediately took over the defense of Luoyang City in an all-round way, and he set up his headquarters on the commanding heights north of Luoyang in order to observe the situation on the battlefield at any time.
Subsequently, he ordered that the outer positions of Luoyang be divided into three parts according to the actual terrain, and that additional troops be sent to strengthen the fortifications. Among them, the 94th Division of the Sichuan Army held the city of Luoyang.
Because the two supreme commanders fled without a fight, many of the original troops fled for their lives, and the originally impregnable Luoyang City did not have many troops at this time. Wu Tinglin had less than 25,000 troops, but the Japanese army had already assembled up to 50,000 troops, and they also had the advantage of weapons.
The whole situation was unfavorable to the nationalist army, and it was unlikely that Luoyang City would be defended.
However, the Japanese side is not monolithic, and there are also contradictions within them. The Japanese offensive was divided into three parts, with the 63rd Division taking the lead in the frontal attack, while the Japanese 1st and 12th Armies attacked from the east and west.
This objectively formed a strange position in which the Japanese army fought its own battles. In fact, the main reason was the contradiction between the Japanese commander-in-chief Okamura Ninji and his deputy, Hidetaro Uchiyama.
Okamura Ninji was an elite officer trained by the japanese army's top brass, and although he lost the Battle of Changsha, he immediately became the supreme commander here after being transferred to North China. Hidetaro Uchiyama, on the other hand, relied on military merit to work hard step by step, so he was very unconvinced by Ninji Okamura.
Later, there were many contradictions between the two because of disagreements, so when it came to specific actions, Okamura Ningji could not command Uchiyama at all. The main elite of the Japanese army in North China was the 1st Army and the 12th Army under Uchiyama.
On May 11, 1944, the Japanese attacked Luoyang from three directions, and the Japanese army relied on powerful artillery, tanks and tanks, and fighting vehicles to start tilting shells at the defensive positions of Luoyang.
The Chinese defenders' positions were suddenly in a sea of fire, and various fortifications were bombed, and the Chinese defenders could only hide from Japanese artillery fire in the tunnels.
After heavy artillery fire, the Japanese infantry began to charge the Chinese positions. The Chinese defenders were now all out of the fortifications and relied on their fortified positions to launch a fierce counterattack against the Japanese.
The Chinese army lacked heavy weapons and then relied on light and heavy machine guns, rifles, grenades, mortars and other firearms to launch a counterattack. But even so, the stubborn resistance of the Chinese soldiers caused the Japanese who marched smoothly along the way to suffer unexpected setbacks.
The Japanese had not encountered such resolute resistance since the beginning of the campaign, and several Japanese charges had been routed, with serious casualties.
The 63rd Division, directly under Gangcun Ningci, was responsible for attacking Luoyang City on the front, and it was the 94th Division of the Sichuan Army that defended Luoyang City. Luoyang is located in the Central Plains, the terrain is flat, there are not many high ground that can be defended, and it can only rely on the buildings in the city to fortify everywhere.
At the beginning of the battle, the two sides fell into a scorching tug-of-war, and the two sides fought fiercely in and around Luoyang, and several positions were conquered by the Japanese. Subsequently, the generals of the Sichuan Army formed a death squad and braved the rain of bullets and bullets to take back the position from the Japanese.
Both sides are hard bones that fight and don't want to die, and the Japanese are notoriously not afraid of death, but the Sichuan army has never accepted defeat. Positions rotated back and forth between the two sides, and each change of hands often meant the total death of the defenders on the positions.
Bodies soon piled up on the road into Luoyang, and the Japanese had to order a retreat in the face of heavy casualties.
The officers and men of the Fifteenth Army, who were ridiculed by the Kuomintang Central Army as bandits in ordinary days, showed a heroic fighting spirit in the defense of Luoyang. Many soldiers engaged in deadly hand-to-hand combat with the Japanese army, and even if they were inserted by the Japanese bayonet, they would hold the Japanese army and die with them.
The Japanese had never seen such stubborn resistance, and Okamura and Hidetaro Uchiyama, looking at their increasing casualties, became angry and ordered their follow-up troops to support themselves, increase the siege force, and take Luoyang at all costs.
The Japanese began to attack the city from the 11th, but until the 19th, Luoyang City was still firmly in the hands of the Chinese army. The Japanese 63rd Division took the main offensive task, but instead of capturing Luoyang, they suffered heavy losses.
Faced with this situation, Okamura Ningji had to give command of the battlefield to Hidetaro Uchiyama.
On the 20th, Uchiyama Commanded the Japanese to launch a second attack, and he wanted to take Luoyang In one fell swoop.
After more than a week of fierce fighting, the losses of the Chinese army were also very heavy, and the outlying positions had all fallen into the hands of the Japanese except for two stations.
Subsequently, Wu Tinglin ordered the troops outside the city to withdraw into the city, and the Ninety-fourth Division and the Fifteenth Army defended the east and west parts of Luoyang City respectively, insisting on fighting the Japanese army to the death.
After Uchiyama took over command, he launched an even more ferocious charge against Luoyang City. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers, armed with rifles, roared towards Luoyang City.
The Chinese soldiers on the position also killed the red eye, and once the Japanese army entered the firing range, the light and heavy machine guns fired at the same time, wiping out all the Japanese troops at the front of the position.
When the Japanese death squad broke through the Chinese defenders' positions, all the soldiers immediately raised their rifles and engaged the enemy in a white-knife battle, and the positions fell into a scuffle for a while.
The Japanese army charged again and again, and finally in exchange for a rout, Uchiyama Hidetaro saw such an attack, but he still could not take Luoyang City. So he ordered the troops to be collected, and he was to take out his secret weapon, the gas bomb.
While the soldiers in the front bravely killed the enemy, Jiang Dingwen, the supreme commander of the First Theater, ignored Chiang Kai-shek's orders and watched from the sidelines in Xi'an, and did not send reinforcements to Luoyang at all. Just watch the defenders fight with their flesh and blood.
In addition, there are also a number of traitors and spies who have long been lurking in Luoyang City. They even openly signaled Japanese aircraft to Japanese warplanes to bomb.
When the defenders of the city discovered these traitors and spies, they killed them on the spot!
At this time, Hidetaro Uchiyama could not sit still, because the casualties were too great. Since the beginning of the campaign, the Japanese army has been smooth sailing, but in the short period of a few days of attacking Luoyang, the Japanese army has already suffered more than a thousand casualties, and it does not make much sense to take Luoyang City in this way.
Therefore, Uchiyama Hidetaro prepared to persuade the Chinese defenders to surrender, but was strictly rejected, and the Chinese position began to shout and curse Uchiyama.
Hidetaro Uchiyama saw that his letter of persuasion had not worked, so he used a loudspeaker to shout to the Chinese army, calling on the Chinese defenders to surrender. The result was a barrage of bullets from the Chinese defenders' positions.
Uchiyama wanted to take Luoyang by other means to reduce Japanese casualties. But none of these measures worked, so he prepared to launch another suicide attack.
The Japanese concentrated all their artillery outside Luoyang, and a large number of troops were transferred from the rear to begin an unprecedented scale of attack. At this time, the Japanese army had already sent all the soldiers it could send, with the aim of taking Luoyang City in an all-round way.
Countless shells were fired into the city of Luoyang, and the city was in a sea of fire, and the Chinese defenders and the Japanese army once again engaged in a deadly hand-to-hand combat. Despite the fierce fighting, the defenders were running out of ammunition and food, and not a single reinforcement was visible on the periphery. None of the Chinese defenders, however, surrendered.
From the 20th, the Japanese launched a second wave of attack, but still failed to completely occupy Luoyang, and the positions of the Chinese army were still firmly in their own hands.
The Japanese army has also killed the red eye, and the Japanese army in north China is different from the japanese army in central China, and they have hardly encountered too strong resistance in north China. Therefore, in their eyes, the Chinese army is a typical example of weakness and incompetence, and there is no need to be afraid at all.
But the defense of Luoyang gave them a glimpse of what a real Chinese soldier was, what a Chinese a real spirit of resistance.
On May 24, the Japanese army sent six large armies to rush into Luoyang City, and the Chinese defenders and the Japanese army launched a fierce street battle in Luoyang City, the two sides fought for each other, and the blood in Luoyang City was drifting.
At the end of the day's fighting, the Japanese suffered thousands of casualties, while the Chinese army also lost 4,000 or 5,000 people.
However, on this day, most of the Positions of the Chinese Army were occupied by the Japanese, most of Luoyang City had been occupied by the Japanese, and the tenacious Chinese defenders still held the last dozen positions in the city and continued to fight with the Japanese.
Since the enemy was outnumbered and there were no reinforcements from the periphery, Wu Tinglin knew that if he continued to hold on, even if the whole army was destroyed, he would not be able to prevent the Japanese army from capturing Luoyang. Therefore, he resolutely ordered that all the defenders retreat to the north of the city at night, and most of the defenders and the wounded and sick were safely transferred outside the city that night, preserving their living forces!
Due to the interruption of communications, some of the defenders could not get the news in time, and they still held their positions, and all of them died heroically in the battle with the Japanese on the second day.
According to post-war statistics, the Nationalist government announced that more than 4,000 Japanese troops were killed and wounded, and the number published by the Japanese army itself was more than 3,500, which was a very rare heavy casualty of the Japanese army on the Battlefield in China.
The casualties of the Chinese army were also very large, 25,000 troops, only 4,000 people finally broke through, and most of the rest died heroically.
It was this unit from the bandit background that inflicted heavy damage on the Japanese army in this battle with a resolute and incomparable will to fight. They are truly anti-Japanese heroes and deserve to be remembered by future generations!
I am the Phantom of Shi Hai, and I am following me to praise history.