The Ming army took advantage of the seemingly rudimentary Qishui fortress and paid the price of about 2,000 men to delay the Third Infantry Division for eight days, so that the Third Infantry Division could not join forces with the Seventh Infantry Division and other troops in time to launch a rush attack under the city of Huangzhou.

In these eight days, the Ming army has successfully returned to the defense, and built a new defense line around Huangzhou!

Now that their second army wants to attack Huangzhou, it can only carry out a tough attack.

And fighting a tough battle is what he Wang Chaohong hates very much, because it means that the battle will become very long, the battle will be more brutal, the casualties will be greater, and the ammunition consumption will be more!

Although the current Datang Army Du Yu has become more and more experienced, and his ability to attack tough battles is getting stronger and stronger, but fundamentally speaking, the Datang Army is not good at fighting tough battles, and they also reject fighting tough battles.

As for bypassing Huangzhou, and then going straight to Hanyang, you are a dead man when you are the 50,000 or 60,000 Ming army governor in the Huangzhou defense line, and as soon as you walk on the front foot, people will dare to cut off your back road, and even go directly to the east to kill, recapture Qizhou, Huangmei, Susong, and then go straight to Anqing.

At that time, your second army can go to Hanyang, but they will also go directly to Jinling!

So even if Huangzhou is difficult to fight, it has to be fought hard.

In fact, from the day it was established, the Datang Army actually formulated a series of training tactics and equipment specifically for frontal battles in the field.

They were armed with muskets, used line infantry tactics, formed grenadiers, and heavy vision artillery, from which it can be seen that most of them were specially prepared for frontal field battles.

This preparation has indeed paid off spectacularly, and at least so far, they have not failed in a head-on field duel!

However, the stronger the Tang Army's ability in the field, the more the Ming Army avoided fighting them in the field!

The failure of many large-scale field battles has already told every general of the Ming army that even if they defend the city and are finally defeated by the last drop of blood, they will never be able to have a frontal field decisive battle with the Tang Army.

Because the former still has some hope of resisting the offensive of the Tang Army, no matter how bad it is, it can support it for a while longer, but for the latter, they have no hope of winning at all, and they often bury tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of troops in a day and a half.

The Jiangnan Campaign and the Northern Expedition are the most typical examples!

At the beginning, Wang Yiqi and later Emperor Zhengde, they were trying to concentrate superior forces to determine the outcome of a battle, and Emperor Zhengde still had nearly 10,000 Ming cavalry at that time, and 50,000 Tatar cavalry as foreign aid.

But as a result, Wang Yiqi's superior forces were hit head-on and quickly collapsed.

Emperor Zhengde personally led the army is not better there, the Tatar cavalry that was pinned on high hopes at that time, lost troops when attacking the Tang army phalanx, and finally the Zhengde Emperor was defeated and died, Altan Khan fled back to the steppe with the remaining Tatar cavalry in embarrassment!

The Jiangnan Campaign and the Northern Expedition almost completely declared the invincibility of the Tang Army in the frontal field decisive battle!

Zhang Yue is not stupid, so he will not let his supervisor repeat the footsteps of Wang Yiqi's Jiangnan New Army and Emperor Zhengde's pro-conquest army!

In fact, even without these two obvious examples, in fact, Zhang Yue had long given up his plan to fight a frontal field battle with the Tang Army.

Although in the end, Jiangxi and Hunan were conquered by the Tang Army, and finally the huge two provinces fell into the hands of the Tang Dynasty, but through this series of defensive operations, Zhang Yue actually supported it for a long time, and bought more time for himself through resistance.

When the Tang Army took Jiangnan, Jiangbei, Shandong, Hebei, Shanxi and other large areas, Hubei and Sichuan were still firmly controlled by Zhang Yue, which shows what this shows and shows that in fact, the stubborn strategy of resisting the standard has achieved a certain success.

In the past two days, the generals of the supervision and bidding have actually been thinking about how to resist the Tang Dynasty Division, or more precisely, how to hold the attack of the Tang Army.

They were equipped with a large number of guns, but they never considered using these guns to fight the Tang Army in a frontal field battle, because they knew that it was unlikely.

What they are thinking about is how to build a defensive line to contain the offensive of the Tang Army!

In the past few years, they have made many attempts!

The early defense system of Hengyang and Changsha was actually quite successful, although in the end these two cities fell, but this does not deny the success of the defense system of the governor in these two cities.

Because in the end, Hengyang was not actually conquered by the Tang Army, but because the Tang Army conquered Yuezhou and strategically surrounded Changsha and Hengyang, the defenders of Hengyang were forced to give up on their own initiative.

And Changsha, although it was conquered by a strong attack in the end, but at that time the Tang Army already had absolute superiority in strength and firepower.

You must know that the Tang Army at that time actually concentrated the First Army and the Second Army, and with 70,000 or 80,000 troops, it attacked Changsha, which was defended by only 10,000 or 20,000 people.

The fall of Changsha is a helpless move!

But this does not mean that the original Changsha defense system was unsuccessful!

If there were more troops in the superintendent at that time, for example, there were 30,000 or 40,000 main forces stationed in the garrison, it was still unknown whether the Tang Army could conquer Changsha at that time.

After retreating to the north of the Yangtze River, the governors continued to carry forward their strategic defensive capabilities, with Hanyang as the center, and built the Hubei region north of the Yangtze River like an iron bucket.

forced the First Army of the Tang Army to confront them on the south bank of the Yangtze River for a long time, and it could not fight at all.

A certain high-ranking general asserted that even if there were 100,000 puppet Tang thief troops attacking, Hanyang would be able to hold it!

When he said this at that time, the Tang Army in the entire Huguang region was only 20,000 or 30,000 people, and 100,000 people could only hope for it.

But now, the Tang Army has really invested 100,000 troops to attack Hubei!

The First Army, the Second Army, and the Fifth Army with strategic reserves, as well as some of the surrounding troops, have a total strength of more than 100,000!

In this case, will they still be able to hold on?

For example, Zhang Yue's very trusted subordinates, the new and first governor of eastern Sichuan, Song Zhiwen, once advised Zhang Yue to abandon the difficult to defend Hanyang, Huangzhou and other places, concentrate forces to defend Jingzhou, especially the Badong area, and close the door to Sichuan.

In this way, they will be able to have enough time and energy to develop Sichuan, accumulate strength, and finally fight out of Sichuan, seize the Central Plains, and prosper the Ming Dynasty!

However, Song Zhiwen's suggestion was rejected by Zhang Yue without hesitation.

Didn't Zhang Yue know that the Hubei region was difficult to defend? Didn't he know that it would be easier to defend by retreating his forces to Padang, or even to Sichuan?

He knew, but could he do it?

He can't!

Just like the Tang Dynasty relied on the emerging industrial and commercial class and peasants to obtain their own basic plates, so as to conquer the world.

Zhang Yue's superintendent already has his own basic plate, that is, the gentry landlords, especially the gentry landlords in the Huguang area.

These gentry and landlords contributed money and efforts to help Zhang Yue maintain such a large army that has been supervising the standard, if Zhang Yue wants to give up Hubei, guess what will happen?

A large number of generals will not hesitate to refuse Zhang Yue's order, and then still lead the army to defend Hubei!

Because Hubei is their homeland, their followers, Sichuan, are their business!

And Zhang Yue did not have the same ability to control the army as Li Xuan in the Tang Dynasty.

Zhang Yue's control of the superintendent was more traditional, and he relied on the allegiance of senior military generals to ensure control of the army.

The senior generals of the superintendent relied on the allegiance of the mid-level generals to control the troops.

Middle-level generals, on the other hand, rely on the allegiance of lower-level generals to control the army.

Low-ranking generals rely on the loyalty of their soldiers to control the army!

Layer after layer of allegiance allowed Zhang Yue to control the original superintendents that had integrated the Huguang Lianjun and the Sichuan Lianjun, and now the total number of superintendents has exceeded 150,000.

And it is precisely this kind of hierarchical allegiance relationship that constitutes the combat effectiveness of the superintendent!

Because, to a certain extent, the soldiers who supervised the standard were not fighting for Zhang Yue, let alone for King Jing in Chengdu, Sichuan, they were fighting for themselves.

You want the descendants of the local gentry and landlords in Hubei to follow you Zhang Yue to Sichuan with an army composed of their own tenants and the children of local farmers, don't dream.

They would rather surrender than go to Sichuan!

Therefore, Zhang Yue never planned to abandon Hubei with the main force of the superintendent, and then retreat to Sichuan, at least, he would not take the army led by the local gentry and generals in Hubei to Sichuan, because even if he wanted to, people would not go.

However, that doesn't mean he didn't do it

Hubei is difficult to hold, he knows very well, so when he deployed Hubei, he also made other arrangements, Song Zhiwen into Sichuan is the most obvious example, Song Zhiwen into Sichuan, brought not only him alone, but also many supervising soldiers, at the same time, the governor also began to win over the local gentry and landlords in Sichuan, in Sichuan to form a supervision.

Or it should be the formation of a local superintendent army in Sichuan!

In the past year or so, with Zhang Yue's expectations, he has successfully trained an army of at least 50,000 people in Sichuan, and at the same time established a large number of workshops in Chongqing Prefecture, and a large number of craftsmen in the Hanyang area were moved to Chongqing Prefecture, among which the one responsible for garrisoning Badong was the governor from Sichuan.