Chapter 622: Battle for the Hetao

Just when Qin Hao and Xiang Yu got married, the great war that was taking place in the land of Hetao finally officially ended.

In August of the third year of Zhongping, Qin and Wen united the four princes of the state and formed a coalition army of 90,000 and the state, while the other side falsely claimed to be 150,000, and the troops were divided into three ways to attack the land of Hetao, where the Xiongnu army was empty.

To this day, the battle has been fought for six full months before it finally ended in the victory of the Jin army.

Of course, it was not easy for the Jin army to win, after all, it was mostly defensive and counterattack battles in the past, but this time it was the initiative to attack, and the two are not the same concept.

At the beginning of the war, the Jin army showed all its strength, as if it would not give up if it did not seize the Hetao.

The Xiongnu obviously did not expect that the Jin army would take the initiative to come to the door, and they were naturally defeated again and again due to lack of preparation.

The Jin army's three-way army has won successive battles, which can be described as morale and morale.

With the arrival of reinforcements led by Wokotai and Jebe, the situation in the Hetao began to tilt gradually, and eventually returned to a stalemate.

After all, the Hetao is a flat river, and cavalry combat is the mainstream.

The Jin army was slightly inferior to the Hun cavalry in terms of number and training of cavalry, so it gradually fell into a disadvantage in the head-on confrontation, and the progress of the attack was naturally not as good as before.

The stalemate lasted for more than a month, until the situation in Hetao was again tilted in favor of the Jin army after the Jin army was equipped with new cavalry equipment, stirrups, saddles and horseshoes.

The horse harness equipment is very easy to copy, and the strength of the grassland cavalry is already stronger than the Han cavalry, if you get these two pieces of equipment, it will be a disaster for the entire northern Xinjiang.

Qin Hao originally didn't plan to take out the harness and equipment so early, but then he figured it out again.

There are so many grassland talents who have been balanced, and the low-level equipment of the harness will definitely be difficult for them, maybe when the harness will be able to be thought of by Temujin and others.

Therefore, it is better to use the harness to fight a big victory to strengthen themselves while they still have it.

Qin Hao expected that Bingzhou and the Xiongnu would definitely fight around the Hetao, so before he became the Taishou of Nanyang, he had sent the harness drawings back to Bingzhou, and secretly ordered craftsmen to build 50,000 sets of new harnesses just in case.

Qin Wen led the army to the Hetao, if everything went well, naturally this batch of harnesses would not be needed, but once it was blocked, this batch of harnesses would make a miraculous achievement.

As Qin Hao expected, the Xiongnu guarding the Hetao were far more tenacious than expected, and the Xiongnu sent reinforcements as expected.

Qin Wen also took out the horse harness sealed in the warehouse, and began to go all out to compete with the Xiongnu for the Hetao.

The 40,000 cavalry of the Jin army, equipped with new horse harnesses, was not inferior to the Xiongnu in terms of riding skills or cavalry warfare, and even faintly surpassed them by relying on the advantages of sophisticated equipment.

The inferiority of the cavalry has been completely compensated, and with the advantage of troops, the Jin army finally regained the initiative in the battle situation and began to encroach on the Hetao Xiongnu little by little.

After losing all his advantages, Ogedai was finally forced to a dead end, and could only fight a decisive battle with the Jin army in advance.

This is also a helpless move, if you don't fight at this time, as time continues to go by, the strength of the Xiongnu in the Hetao will become weaker and weaker, and then it will be a big deal if Wokotai wants to fight.

This decisive battle finally started at the foot of Yinshan Mountain, known as the Battle of Yinshan in history.

Qin Wen personally led 40,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, a total of 80,000 cavalry coalition troops, against the 50,000 cavalry coalition troops of the Xiongnu and Hetao tribes.

In the decisive battle of the 130,000 army, 90,000 were cavalry troops, and the Jin army put ninety percent of the cavalry into it.

If they win, the Jin army can take advantage of the situation and become a warlord who is not inferior to the Liang army;

But once lost, the Jin army would have to recuperate for several years before they could have the spare strength to compete with the Xiongnu for the Hetao again.

Risks and opportunities coexist, and Qin Wen chose to face the difficulties.

The Jin army did not crush the strength of the Xiongnu, so the decisive battle was also very difficult, and after paying nearly 15,000 huge casualties, it finally defeated the grassland coalition army, and achieved the brilliant result of killing 20,000 enemies and capturing 10,000.

After the defeat and retreat of the 15,000 remnants of the army led by Wokotai, he continued to use the method of cavalry guerrillas, wanting to drag until Temujin completely solved Wuhuan, and then lead the army to the Jin army to fight each other.

Wokotai thought very beautifully, but Qin Wen would not give him this opportunity, and directly used the Thunder Offensive to completely expel the Xiongnu forces from the Hetao, leaving no future trouble.

From August of the third year of Zhongping to February of the fourth year of Zhongping, the battle for the Hetao lasted for a whole six months, and it lasted for half a year.

For the first four months, the combined state forces had been fighting against the Xiongnu.

As for the last two months, the Jin army was purging the resistance of all ethnic groups in the Hetao, and it also paid a lot of price.

After the resistance of all ethnic groups in the Hetao was completely eliminated, the battle for the Hetao was completely over.

Although the battle for Hetao was won in the end, it was only a crushing victory for the Jin army.

According to statistics after the war, the Jin army suffered nearly 30,000 casualties, 20,000 were killed in direct battle, and most of them were cavalry in the middle of the period, which was second only to the casualties of the Yellow Turban War.

In addition, Yang Sanlang, the third son of the general Yang Ye and a basic force of 94, was shot to death by Jebe with a hidden arrow in the field battle, becoming the only super-first-class general to die in this battle.

Yang Qilang lost his mind due to the death of his third brother and rode alone to chase and kill Jebe, but he was shot with three arrows, of course, none of them were critical, so he was only seriously injured.

Jebe was also smashed by his old opponent Zhao Yun, and his breastplate was shattered with a single shot, and he escaped with serious injuries.

Although the losses were large, the results were even greater.

The first is the territory.

The land of the Hetao, fertile and thousands of miles, is much larger than the 800-mile pass, and is the sum of the four counties in the north.

The Jin army originally owned the land of the five counties in the northern part of the state, but after taking the Hetao, the territory under its command directly doubled.

More land means more people can be accommodated, not to mention the extremely fertile soil in the Loop, which is ideal for cultivation.

If the Jin army can immigrate one million, as long as it has been developed for three or five years, it can support tens of millions of people, and the war potential is extremely huge.

The second is population.

In addition to the Xiongnu, there were several medium-sized tribes and dozens of small nomadic tribes in the Hetao.

In addition to those killed in battle and purged to death, the combined population of these dozens of tribes was nearly 150,000.

With a population of 150,000, this may not be a big deal in the Central Plains, but for the sparsely populated Bingzhou, it is the population of a large county.

Those who are not of my race will have different hearts.

It is not easy to completely recover these hundreds of thousands of aliens, and the Jin army must migrate to the Hetao, exceeding the population of more than four times the native aliens in the Hetao, plus more than ten years of governance, in order to completely assimilate these 150,000 aliens.