"Go forward, don't retreat, life and death have reached the last moment, compatriots have been killed, land has been occupied, we can no longer bear it. Go forward, don't retreat, not an inch of China's territory can be lost, sacrifice our blood and flesh to fight the enemy's head! ”

The song sounded in the city of Nanjing.

The battle to defend the capital is about to break out!

In the battle of Songhu, the army captured Shanghai, but the price they paid exceeded their expectations, and the dream of "three months of death" was also shattered. A kind of impatience that cannot be reached, a feeling of confusion and anger spread among the army.

Thus, the Battle for Nanjing was fought before a group of almost crazy executioners!

Originally, according to the "Capital Fortress Plan" formulated by the Military Commissar in 1935, the army should not have come so quickly, and the battle for the defense of Nanjing should not have started in Nanjing. This plan was led by Zhang Zhizhong, and its strategic thinking was:

"Nanjing's defense is not in Nanjing itself, but in the outer Taihu Lake area."

In this area, the Kuomintang army operated two lines of defense for many years: the Wufu line from Suzhou in the south to Fushan in the north, and the Xicheng line from Wuxi in the south to Jiangyin in the north. They are located between railways, highways, and canals, making full use of the network of lakes and marshes in the south of the Yangtze River, the rivers crisscrossing and the terrain characteristics of hills, and are the ideal area to block the westward advance of the Yue army.

However, this plan did not come to fruition,

Before the Battle of Nanjing was about to start, the Central Teaching Corps was the most elite defense force in the plan, they had been stationed in the Nanjing area for four or five years, known as Chiang Kai-shek's "Iron Guard", with three infantry brigades under its jurisdiction, imitating the German infantry establishment, with a total of more than 30,000 people, and was the best equipped and strongest unit in the Battle of Nanjing, with the general captain Gui Yongqing and the chief of staff Qiu Qingquan.

The teaching corps fortified in the areas of Purple Mountain, Qilin Gate, and Zhongshan Gate. The left neighbor of the corps is Wang Jingjiu's 87th Division, and they and Sun Yuanliang's 88th Division jointly defend the Purple Mountain and Yuhuatai line, which are the two strongholds that must be fought for in the defense of Nanjing City since ancient times.

The river gate is the only way to the north of the river, and in case of retreat, the river must be crossed from here. Tang Shengzhi, who was in charge of the defense of the capital, when arranging the defense, in order to show that he had fought against the water, "swore to live and die with Nanjing", let the original two ferries that could take seven or eight hundred people go to Hankou, and there were only a few small steamers left, which were also handed over by him to the 36th Division, and the officers and soldiers defending the city were not allowed to cross the river without permission, and at the same time Tang Shengzhi instructed Hu Zongnan's First Army in Jiangbei and Song Xilian's 36th Division outside the Jiangjiang Gate in Jiangnan:

Someone crosses privately, and the military law will deal with it!

On November 11, 1937, Chiang Kai-shek convened [***] generals for the second time to discuss the defense of Nanjing.

At the meeting, almost all other generals agreed that Nanjing should not be held to the death. At this time, Tang Shengzhi stood up and said passionately, Nanjing is the capital of our country, it is the center of international view, and it is also where the prime minister's mausoleum is located. On November 20, 1937, Tang Shengzhi officially assumed the post of commander of the Nanjing garrison.

As the capital of the Republic of China Nanjing, according to legend, when Zhu Yuanzhang built the capital of Nanjing, he opened thirteen city gates at the beginning, Zhu Yuanzhang climbed high to inspect the city wall, and found that the Forbidden City, the imperial palace located in the east, was close to Zhongshan and was not conducive to city defense, so he ordered to build another circle of outer city with the help of the hilly terrain outside the city, and built a part of the city wall in the dangerous place, and opened the city gate eighteen times, so the Nanjing city gate has the saying of "thirteen inside, eighteen outside". The outer city is long gone, but the names of these gates have survived as place names. Gaoqiaomen, located in the southeastern suburbs of Nanjing, is one of the "Outer Eighteen", when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fought Tianjing, after the Wuchang Uprising, the Jiangsu and Zhejiang coalition forces attacked Nanjing, Gaoqiaomen was once a fierce battlefield, it was a gateway from the southeast into Nanjing.

The clock of history has turned to December 1937.

The army continued to advance westward along the Beijing-Shanghai line, and the vanguard arrived near Jurong in early December, preparing to attack Nanjing. The doom of war once again befell the city of Nanjing.

In front of the Takahashi Gate, an empty wilderness.

The wind was blowing strongly, and the flag of the standard-bearer was loud in the wind. Soldiers wearing blue-green steel helmets, armed with steel guns, stood in a neat formation facing north, and the scene was solemn.

The 305th Regiment of the 74th Army, which had just undergone a fierce battle and a long-distance transfer, was undergoing a special oath-taking ceremony before entering the battle.

Returning from Wangting to the large army, Zhang Lingfu, the commander of the 305th Regiment, fell to the ground with a stone in his heart, thinking that he could breathe a sigh of relief for the time being, but before the bench was hot, Wang Yaowu issued him a new combat mission:

The whole regiment immediately moved to the southern suburbs of Nanjing to take over the reserve position of the 51st Division!

In the positional battles and the blocking battles along the retreat route in Shanghai over the past few months, the 74th Army's vitality was greatly lost, the platoon commanders suffered many casualties, and the shortage of soldiers was even more serious.

For this reason, the army commander Yu Jishi made a special trip to Nanjing and asked Chiang Kai-shek to let the 74th Army, like Hu Zongnan's 1st Army, be able to cross the Yangtze River north to rest. But the instructions he brought back were not to retreat north, and he announced to everyone the latest order of the high command:

The troops retreating to the vicinity of Nanjing had to leave a part to defend the capital, and the 74th Army had already been included in the sequence of defending the capital. This means that the troops must fight continuously without stopping.

When Zhang Lingfu led his troops to fight fiercely at Wangting, the Nanjing Command's policy of defending the capital had been decided, and the symbolic surname defense discussed at the beginning was changed to a permanent surname defense, so that the troops defending the city needed to be greatly strengthened.

Tang Shengzhi asked Chiang Kai-shek to serve as the defender of Nanjing, and the Nanjing Garrison Commander's Department immediately dispatched troops, and the 74th Army, which was not on the garrison list, was thus pulled into the sequence of defending the capital.

The other troops left behind in Nanjing, like the 74th Army, were almost all crippled in the Battle of Songhu, and after a chaotic long-distance retreat, there was no time to carry out even a short-term training supplement in the rear.

Military orders are like a mountain. As soon as the order was received, the 51st Division quickly moved westward from Jurong, and arrived at the outskirts of Nanjing on November 28, stationed in the middle of Chunhua Town, Tongjimen, and was ordered to garrison part of the outer defense line of Nanjing's city defense from Fangshan to Chunhua Town.

Chunhua Town is in the southeast suburbs of Nanjing, 18 kilometers away from Zhonghua Gate, and in 1937 there was the Beijing-Shanghai National Highway through. If the army attacks Nanjing from Jurong all the way, Chunhua Town is a necessary place, and it will definitely attack with the main force.

The task of the 51st Division was to defend the southern gate to Nanjing.

At the division headquarters in Shangfang Town, Wang Yaowu issued operational arrangements to the commanders of each regiment: Ji Hongru's 301st Regiment occupied the line from Songshu to Shangzhuang through Chunhua Town, and Cheng Zhi's 302nd Regiment occupied the line from Fangshan on the right to Songshu on the left.

Zhang Lingfu's 305th Regiment, which had just returned, was responsible for guarding the line from Gaoqiaomen to Heding Bridge and building a reserve position; Qiu Weida's 306th Regiment was in reserve, and the first regiment was placed in Hushu Town to prevent the enemy from attacking from the right flank.

Wang Yaowu's defense was basically a defensive position in depth along the Beijing-Shanghai National Highway at that time!