After all, the scale of the Battle of Saibei was far smaller than the Battle of Wuhan, and more than 1.4 million troops from China and Japan competed in the Wuhan area.

The annihilation of the 106th Division by Han Yunhua's subordinates had a far-reaching impact both politically and militarily, and after more than a year of war, China certainly suffered heavy losses. However, the Japanese army is not as easy as imagined, compared with the Japanese army a year ago, the current Japanese army has always declined in terms of combat effectiveness and combat. When the highly trained veterans were gradually consumed by the Chinese crowd, the Japanese government had to recruit a large number of reservists and even civilians to join the army. And only a very small number of these "warriors" with general military knowledge can temper themselves through actual combat and eventually become qualified fighters. But the vast majority of people were either killed on the battlefield or chose to become deserters, and could not become a qualified soldier.

After the annihilation of the 106th Division, a telegram was sent from Tokyo, which was very dissatisfied with Okamura's performance. The Central China Dispatch Army in Nanjing also sent a telegram expressing "deep concern" that his offensive would not progress for a long time, and at the same time accusing the main force of the 11th Army of not advancing to Wuhan as planned and cutting off the retreat of the Chinese defenders on the Guangdong-Han Line, which would inevitably affect the entire battlefield operation.

Okamura Ninji, a prominent figure in the Japanese military circles, had never suffered such humiliation, and for a time Okamura was ashamed and resentful. Unlike Matsuura, Okamura was not impulsive, he judged the situation and knew that it would be difficult to make great progress if he continued to fight like this. If he and Xue Yue continue to fight in the complex terrain near the mouth of the lake, I am afraid that they will still be victorious if they fight for a few more months. Affecting the overall battle situation of the Battle of Wuhan, then what awaits him may be the punishment of dismissal on the spot. The annihilation of the 106th Division was a foregone conclusion, but the impact on the Battle of Wuhan was not decisive, and the Japanese still had the strength to attack again.

This time, ** did not disappoint Chiang Kai-shek, and when all parts of the country cheered for Han Yunhua's subordinates to achieve such a great victory again, Xue Yue also completed the deployment of the 27th Division. Xue Yue mobilized a full 13 divisions to encircle and annihilate the 27th Division, and at the same time mobilized 4 armies to contain other units of the Japanese army.

After the last gap in the east of the lake mouth was blocked, Xue Yue immediately reported to Chiang Kai-shek the battle plan for encircling and annihilating the 27th Division, hoping that Chiang Kai-shek would send naval and air force support to prevent the Japanese from jumping over the wall in a hurry.

Unlike the arrogant Lieutenant General Matsuura, the commander of the 27th Division, Masatharu Honma, still has a little strategic vision, and the news from the front line of the division Lieutenant General Masaharu Honma analyzed that the squadron is moving extremely frequently, and it seems that some big conspiracy is brewing.

Although Lieutenant General Honma Masaharu had no way of knowing what the difficult opponent on the opposite side wanted to do, Lieutenant General Honma Masaharu still keenly ordered his troops to shrink the defensive line and hurry up the time to stock up on weapons and ammunition. At the same time, Honma Masaharu also sent a telegram to his boss, Lieutenant General Okamura Ninji, hoping that the 101st Division could move closer to the 27th Division.

However, Okamura Ninji, who was anxious to break through, did not take Lieutenant General Masaharu Honma's advice, but ordered the 27th Division to occupy Hukou Prefecture within five days. Okamura Ninji didn't know that his paper order had completely sent the 27th Division to a dead end, and extinguished the last bit of hope for the 27th Division to escape from Ascension.

Taking advantage of the fact that the Japanese army had not yet reacted, Xue Yue believed that the time had come to annihilate the Japanese army in front of him, and decisively issued a combat order to launch a siege against the 27th Division, which was already in the encirclement. In the afternoon of the same day, Xue Yue gave an order, and the general attack began, with 100,000 troops attacking on all fronts, and for a time there were Chinese athletes everywhere to attack. The Japanese army was still fighting, they occupied several high ground along the lake mouth, relying on the support of Japanese aircraft, desperately resisting.

The squadron that participated in the attack included the 74th Army, the ace main force of the squadron, and the 4th Army, known as the Iron Army. The 74th Army, under the leadership of Yu Jishi, stormed Jianshan and Fushan to the east of Hukou County. The 74th Army did not lose the anti-Japanese iron army, they quickly approached the Japanese army, and then threw grenades at close range, and then followed by white-knuckle combat, and the fierce attack hit the Japanese army crying dad and mother. After just over a day of fighting, the frontal battlefield attacked by the 74th Army caused more than 4,000 casualties to the 27th Division, and conquered Jianshan, one of the main positions of the Japanese army, on the same day. Killed 4,324 people under Major General Toshitoku Nagami, commander of the 27th Infantry Brigade of the Japanese Army, and broke a large arm of Lieutenant General Masaharu Honma. ,

At the same time, the ** squadron in Tongzijian and other places also launched a fierce attack on the 27th Division, and after receiving a series of telegrams from his subordinates asking for help, Lieutenant General Masaharu Honma finally reacted that the current situation was very bad, and they were likely to fall for the strategy of the ** squadron, and it seemed that they had followed in the footsteps of the 106th Division. Masaharu Honma, whose back was cold, sent a report to Lieutenant General Okamura Ninji with a trembling voice, strongly asking Okamura Ninji to send troops to rescue the 27th Division.

At this time, Okamura Ninji seemed to be much older, and at the age of forty, he was originally an energetic age, but the successive major battles during this time, especially the successive bad news, made this lieutenant general, who had always had an excellent reputation in the Japanese Army, aged a lot in a few days. Lieutenant General Okamura also panicked at this time, if even the 27th Division was left here, then what would be waiting for him. At this time, when Okamura received a telegram from Masaharu Honma that he had encountered a fierce siege by the squadron, he felt that things were not good, and the air force that was soon dispatched to reconnoiter also received information: the main force of the 27th Division had confronted the squadron about 15 kilometers east of Kokou Prefecture, and a large number of squadrons were found in the surrounding mountains and mountains. Okamura was shocked when he heard the news, and he finally judged that Xue Yue's purpose was to lure the entire division of the 27th Division to the Hukou area and annihilate it.

Lieutenant General Okamura Ninji ordered Masaharu Honma to concentrate all his forces and break through to the area of Takeyama and Kamitoyama in the south of Kokou Prefecture, where the 101st Division would receive the 27th Division. At the same time, the 101st Division, the remnants of the 9th Division, and the Hatata Detachment also received a telegram from Lieutenant General Okamura Ninji, ordering them to rescue the besieged 27th Division at all costs.

In order to cooperate with the ground forces of the 27th Division to break through, Lieutenant General Okamura Ninji sent a large number of Japanese planes to meet them. The Japanese planes flew in one after another, dropped the bombs and then quickly returned, and so on. Because the woods in the Hukou area were not dense and dense, and there were no high mountains and mountains, only a few small hills, the Japanese planes dropped bombs very well, and for a time Xue Yue's troops suffered great losses. However, in order to encircle and annihilate the 27th Division, Xue Yue did not hesitate to transfer part of the main force of Zhang Fakui's Second Corps, so it was calculated that the Japanese Air Force had caused huge casualties to the Chinese Army, but the 27th Division was still hopeless to break through.

In order to improve the accuracy of bomb dropping and to rescue the 27th Division from the encirclement as soon as possible, all the Japanese planes flew almost close to the top of the tree, and only the planes flew over the low long grass and were blown around. The Japanese initially dropped incendiary bombs and bombs, but the effect was not ideal, because most of the squadrons had already taken precautions against this. At Okamura's signal, the Japanese planes switched to dropping poison gas bombs, and in less than a day, not only did all the civil fortifications of the squadron's position burn down, not even a single weed remained, and there were blazing fires and charred maps and tree roots everywhere. The officers and men of the squadron suffered heavy casualties in the flames, and the few surviving red-clothed and blackened soldiers swore to the death on the scorched earth position to block several crazy attacks of the Japanese army, which gave the Japanese soldiers an extremely strong psychological shock, and they even doubted whether the opponent was human? There is also a deep suspicion about the effectiveness of the bullets fired. What was even more shocking was that the poison gas bombs dropped by Japanese planes formed more than a dozen huge poison gas belts in the area around the mouth of the lake, but the heroic Chinese army continued to attack with wet towels covering their nostrils. The last 5,000 people of the 27th Division were finally compressed into a small hill of less than five kilometers, and around it was an encirclement formed by 100,000 Chinese troops. The 27th Division is less than ten miles away from the nearest 101st Division, but this short ten miles has become an insurmountable moat for the 27th Division.

The two sides fought to the death for a day, but there was still no progress, the squadron did not completely annihilate the 27th Division, and the 11th Army did not rescue the 27th Division. Lieutenant General Okamura Ninji, who was in a hurry to seek medical treatment, asked the commander of the Central China Front, General Tsukutoshi Liu, for instructions, hoping that a paratrooper unit could be sent to the rescue, on the grounds that the open terrain around Hukou was very suitable for paratroopers to land, and at the same time, the paratroopers could rush to the scene of the incident as quickly as possible to rescue them. With the example of General Terauchi Shouichi, General Tsukushi didn't dare to sit back and watch the 27th Division be annihilated by the squadron like this, so he agreed to Okamura Ninji's request.

This is the first time that paratroopers have been used on a large scale, and the Japanese paratroopers cannot be called paratroopers at present, but can only be said to be the prototype of the paratrooper units, which are the airborne troops with the worst tactics and technology that have been evaluated by their German counterparts. After the formation of the Japanese Airborne Forces, they were subordinate to the Army Aviation Corps and the Marine Corps as special arms, but after the Japanese Airborne Forces were formed, due to the backwardness of military thinking and equipment, the airborne training has been stuck in the primitive basic training such as tower jumping, and the focus of the tactical and technical training of the paratroopers is still the shooting and assassination of the infantry. ,

But during this period, many of these "elite" soldiers, selected from the infantry, suffered from fear of heights and other psychological disorders, and although they barely managed to maintain their training under the high pressure of officers, they were repeatedly suspended from training due to frequent accidents. During the exercise, the Japanese airborne troops had frequent accidents and created many "miracles" in the history of airborne, including during a parachute training exercise, two transport planes collided shortly after taking off, and the paratroopers on board were "loyal" to the emperor before they could take part in a single actual battle. When the airborne landing was carried out, the pilot of the first plane misjudged the airborne landing site due to flight illusions, and actually threw all the airborne detachments into the sea, and the planes behind also followed closely and "unloaded" their own paratroopers into the sea, causing dozens of soldiers to drown because they could not break free from the parachutes in time. As a result of this accident, the airborne live exercise was urgently stopped, and the commander who commanded the exercise was also dismissed. While Germany, which had formed paratroopers almost at the same time, had repeatedly used airborne troops in the European theater of operations and achieved positive results in the future, the Japanese airborne troops, which had learned from Germany, were plagued by frequent accidents and could not talk about any combat effectiveness.

So far, some technical problems related to the Japanese paratroopers have not been solved, so all the officers, including General Tsukudan, are not very optimistic about this airborne rescue. Although some time ago the head of the paratrooper unit announced that the paratrooper unit had finally overcome the relevant technical problems and achieved training results that could be used in combat, there were not many people who were skeptical about this. At that time, German experts evaluated the Japanese army's airborne troops as "the most tactically and technically bad airborne troops" in the world.

However, just as the Japanese paratroopers were ready to start boarding, an urgent message came from the front that the paratrooper rescue operation was urgently canceled, and the paratrooper rescue operation died before it could be carried out.