Nanjing City still has ammunition, food, and troops, and more importantly, the will to resist and the last morale, and it can hold out for a while, and when the two sides are exhausted, it is the best time for the peripheral national army to launch the final battle.

But now, General Tang, who recites Buddha, has issued such a general retreat order that hits morale, this is not to the Buddha, but to evil.

As a high-ranking military commander, he knows very well that this kind of retreat is very dangerous, and it is tantamount to putting the lives of more than 100,000 soldiers on the line of life and death.

Don't be like the young marshal in the northeast, who always uses the order of the Supreme Military Council as an excuse, saying that it is an order issued by the Military Commission and calling for the whole army to retreat.

will be outside, and the king's name will not be affected; is also the commander, and then General Xue often resisted some orders of the military committee above, and only then did he achieve several great victories in the War of Resistance Against Japan.

If you follow the orders from above and direct the battle, what is the use of you? Without a certain degree of autonomy and individual courage, one cannot be a commander of a large army.

Note: After the fact, it was also the War of Resistance, and the relatively successful defense of Changde and Hengyang were less than the defenders of Nanjing.

The defenders of Changde are a division of the 74th Army, plus local personnel, there are more than 10,000 people; The defenders of Hengyang were the 10th Army, with a maximum of 30,000 men, which could withstand the attack of more than 100,000 Japanese troops for more than 40 days.

……

Alas! These are all the things of the upper-class bigwigs, the three dogs, like ants in the big era, life and death are all in the thoughts of the bigwigs.

On December 12, the 26th year of the Republic of China (1937), at about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the Nanjing Garrison Commander's Department convened a meeting of the commanders of all armies and divisions, and the commander, General Tang, ordered a retreat.

After the order to retreat was issued, most of the division commanders of the various armies did not return to their troops, but only called and retreated after the order was issued.

What was even more confusing was that at 7 p.m., General Tang issued a redundant and deadly order to retreat, that is, to order all troops, if they could not follow the route of the breakthrough, those who had ferries could cross the river and assemble at Chuzhou.

This is very fucked, before the 36th Division was sent to defend the river of Nanjing City, not allowed to build pontoon bridges, not allowed to keep boats privately, now there is nothing on the river, how do you let 100,000 troops cross the river?

Moreover, this order greatly reduced the seriousness of the previous order to break through by land, and also created an excuse for the troops not to carry out the previous order.

It can be imagined that in the face of the enemy's encirclement on three sides, everyone wants to retreat towards the side of the Yangtze River that is not encircled, and no one is willing to counterattack and break through in the other three directions at this time.

In fact, if there was no order from this second bastard, there would not have been such chaos and huge losses, more than 100,000 troops, separate from multiple directions by land to break through the whole line, no matter how many Japanese soldiers and how good their weapons were, in the night, they would not be able to block all the Chinese troops.

Even so, the 66th Army and the 83rd Army of the Guangdong Army broke through by land according to the order, although there were few people and did not achieve the effect of breaking through the whole line and making the Japanese army scramble, but they still broke through some of them, and by the way, they also killed many enemies.

But now, because of the second order of that superfluous fucker, a large number of troops, all flocked to the banks of the Yangtze River, but there were almost no boats and pontoon bridges on the shore.

This General Tang caused many people in the army at that time to curse him, and even doubted whether he was a member of the Japanese army, if it wasn't for a Japanese soldier, then how could he be so deliberately framing his own hundreds of thousands of troops?

……

Note: According to the battle report of the 51st Division of the 74th Army:

At noon on the 12th, the battlements west of the Zhonghua Gate were blown up by the enemy in several places. By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, the enemy had climbed the wall and climbed the city with about 200 people, and the defenders of our left flank (87th Division) retreated without a fight, and the eastern section of the city wall was empty.

Although our 306th Regiment struggled to expel the enemy, due to the control of the enemy fire in Yuhuatai, and its strength was extremely weak, it held out until 7 p.m., and the battalion commander Wan Qiong was killed, one member of the regiment commander Qiu Weida was wounded, and more than 1,300 people below the company commander were killed.

……

The 306th Regiment of the 51st Division fought alone until 7 o'clock in the evening of the 12th, and the regiment commander Qiu Weida knew that without any friendly troops covering each other, if the fight continued like this, the whole regiment would be annihilated.

Therefore, Regiment Commander Qiu summoned the surviving battalion and company commanders to his side, and studied the retreat route with the help of flashlights on the city wall.

Commander Qiu was shot and fractured in his left leg, and was saved by the three dogs and them in the line of fire, according to the plan just agreed, while resisting, retreating, and leaping forward step by step.

……

The battle to defend the city wall near Zhonghua Gate was one of the fiercest and most tragic battle scenes in the defense of Nanjing, according to the "History of the Nanjing Garrison":

Tan Daoping, chief of the staff office of the Nanjing Garrison Headquarters, described it as a spontaneous and automatic rush of thousands of soldiers who had lost command and order, using their bodies as city walls, just to intercept the enemy's attack.

……

One of the American journalists Dave? Bergamini's account:

The winter moon had not yet risen, only the terrifying sound of grenade explosions and flickering flashes of flares, and the Chinese troops fought with old rifles and broadswords with their hands on the parapets, which had been battered by artillery fire.

The Japanese climbed the ladder under the cover of machine guns, and the ladder was erected and overturned, and then erected again, and the sound of machine guns, the swishing sound of stray bullets, and the loud sound of shells slamming to the ground were mixed together, mixed with the sound of bodies falling into the ancient moat.

……

The tenacious fighting spirit displayed by the Chinese soldiers on this position had to be impressed even by the Japanese troops who attacked on the spot.

According to the "Detailed Report on the Battles of the 15th Infantry Wing No. 6" in the 11th volume of the "Japanese Military Documents" of the "Nanjing Massacre Historical Collection":

Among them, the 150th Infantry Wing of the Japanese Army wrote in its report summarizing the battle near the Zhonghua Gate:

The enemy is particularly good at defensive operations, and when it encounters a concentrated artillery bombardment by our heavy artillery and field artillery, it is temporarily silent, and as soon as the shelling is stopped, it immediately begins to shoot, as if it does not give our troops a chance to charge.

On the afternoon of the 12th, from more than 4 o'clock to late at night, the enemy army made more than a dozen consecutive counterattacks in an attempt to recapture the city wall.

……

Although the Zhonghua Gate and the nearby fortified positions were lost one after another after midnight on the 12th, the heroic resistance of the Chinese army dealt a heavy blow to the arrogance of the Japanese army.

However, all these efforts and sacrifices, especially the 306th Regiment of the 51st Division of the 74th Army, where Sangou was located, killed thousands of people, of which there were only more than 40 people left in the Seventh Company, and all these achievements were buried under that fucking retreat order.