Among the four new warlords of the Kuomintang after the victory of the Northern Expedition, Feng Yuxiang's seniority was undoubtedly the oldest, but his origin was also the lowest. Unlike Yan Xishan, Li Zongren and other people who stayed in the West or came from a military academy, Feng Yuxiang was a typical old-fashioned military background.
When he was a teenager, Feng Yuxiang entered the Huai Army as a soldier and fought in the army, and the Northwest Army under his command was basically promoted from ordinary soldiers layer by layer. Feng Yuxiang's peak moment should have been after the Second Northern Expedition, when he occupied the four provinces of Qinghai, Ningxia, Gansu, and Shaanxi in the northwest, and also brought Shandong Henan in the Central Plains into his rule.
At this time, Feng Yuxiang had the most extensive territory in the country, and his military strength was second only to lao Jiang's central army. So what kind of development process did Feng Yuxiang's Northwest Army go through, and how many troops did he have at his peak?
Before the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution, Feng Yuxiang had become an army pipe belt, equivalent to today's battalion commander. After the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution, Feng Yuxiang participated in the Luanzhou Uprising, but suffered defeat. Thanks to Lu Jianzhang's help, Feng Yuxiang survived and was able to continue to serve as an officer in the army, and was promoted to the commander of the first regiment of the Beijing Guards in the second year of the Republic of China.
The following year, Feng Yuxiang was promoted again and became the brigade commander of the 14th Brigade of the 7th Division of the Army, which also meant that he officially became a general. In September, he was appointed brigade commander of the Army's 16th Mixed Brigade, which can be said to be the starting point of Feng Yuxiang, although the number of people is only a few thousand, but the follower Feng Yuxiang has traveled from many places.
After that, Feng Yuxiang's military achievements gradually increased, and the strength of his troops reached one division, and he himself was appointed as a general in the army by the Beiyang government.
In the 13th year of the Republic of China, during the Second Zhifeng War, Feng Yuxiang took advantage of Wu Peifu's defection in the front line to control Beijing, which directly led to the rout of the warlord Wu Peifu.
The Beijing coup launched by Feng Yuxiang caused the Beiyang government to fall into the hands of Duan Qirui Zhang Zuolin, and Feng Yuxiang also gained a certain right to speak. But Feng Yuxiang was not Zhang and Duan's opponent, and he was ostracized. In the end, Duan Qirui appointed Feng Yuxiang as the Northwest Border Defense Inspector, and in this way, Feng Yuxiang was forced to withdraw from Beijing and take up a post in Zhangjiakou.
In 1924, Feng Yuxiang's army began to be called the Northwest Army because he telegraphed the title of Nationalist Army. Although on the surface he had only three divisions under his command, the expanded army of the Concubines already numbered 70,000 or 80,000, counting the Combined Second and Third Armies of the Nationalist Army, with a total strength of 180,000.
On October 23, 1924, Feng Yuxiang staged a coup d'état in Beijing and besieged the Forbidden City
Due to the large territory and large number of troops occupied by Feng Yuxiang, it naturally became an obstacle to Zhang Zuolin's expansion, and Feng Yuxiang also supported Guo Songling's rebellion, and after defeating Guo Songling, Zhang Zuolin and the resurrected Wu Peifu reconciled to form a coalition army to jointly attack Feng Yuxiang.
The two forces joined forces, Feng Yuxiang's Northwest Army was defeated, defeated and retreated, and finally in 1926, the army was defeated and forced to go to the Soviet Union. However, Zhang Zuolin still did not spare the Northwest Army, and he continued to suppress the Northwest Army, while uniting Yan Xishan in Shanxi and Wu Peifu in Henan.
Eventually, the Northwest Army fell apart, partly surrendering to Yan Xishan and partly retreating to Suiyuan. In 1936, when the Nationalist government in Guangzhou's 100,000-strong army swore an oath to the Northern Expedition, Feng Yuxiang, who was on an expedition in the Soviet Union, joined the Kuomintang and was appointed as a representative and returned home in September.
Because of Feng Yuxiang's strong influence on the Northwest Army, the scattered Northwest Army at that time quickly assembled and was reorganized into 5 armies by Feng Yuxiang. Wuyuan oath division joined the Northern Expeditionary Army, and Feng Yuxiang successfully contacted the siege of Xi'an and occupied Gansu, Qinghai and other places.
At this time, Feng Yuxiang's military strength had grown to more than 200,000 people, and his strength had been completely restored, and there was further growth. In 1928, in order to completely defeat the Beiyang warlords, the kuomintang's four new armies, Xuzhou, swore an oath to carry out the second Northern Expedition and the second Northern Expedition was successful, and Zhang Zuolin's Northwest Army retreated to Guanwai. At this time, Feng Yuxiang's military strength reached its peak, and the Northwest Army's consort troops had 420,000 people.
However, the peak of the Northwest Army was short-lived, and after the defeat of the war with the Central Army in 1929, Feng Yuxiang was forced to go down and was placed under house arrest by Yan Xishan. Subsequently, the Central Plains War broke out, the two sides participated in the battle of more than 1 million troops, Feng Yuxiang's northwest army completely collapsed, because Feng Yuxiang's management was feudal paternalistic, so almost all of his generals defected.
After the Battle of the Central Plains, part of the original 400,000-strong Northwest Army was absorbed by Lao Jiang, part of it became Zhang Xueliang's troops, and some of them became their own factions or directly disintegrated. The Northwest Army, which Feng Yuxiang had painstakingly managed for many years, also disappeared in the tide of history.
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