Chapter Seventy-Three: The Conspiracy of Shouichi Terauchi (1)
On 21 May, after a difficult trek of more than 10 days, Han Yunhua and others finally returned to the Daqingshan base area, and the task of collecting arms on the eastward journey, which lasted more than 20 days, was successfully completed.
The reason why Han Yunhua and the others were able to return to Daqingshan so quickly was also thanks to his previous fame. Li Shouxin was originally full of confidence and sent troops to intercept Han Yunhua and others in the area of the Xilin Gol League, but halfway through, he heard that he was going to intercept the troops of Han Yunhua's department of the Eighth Route Army, and Li Shouxin hesitated a little. Nothing else, this Li Shouxin did not suffer a lot under Han Yunhua, as early as the beginning of the spring of this year, the 23rd Cavalry Division under his command was inexplicably folded in Han Yunhua's hands, and none of the nearly 3,000 people in the division could escape.
Later, when his other cavalry division went out with Major General Kuroda Shigetoku, the commander of the Datong garrison, to attack the northwest of Jin, he was defeated by Han Yunhua's troops, and the cavalry of a division came back less than a regiment, so the scene was called a miserable.
What frightened Li Shouxin the most was the four-way siege campaign of Han Yunhua's headquarters some time ago, in which his troops went out with the Sixth Division, and this battle completely changed Li Shouxin's view of the Eighth Route Army. Just as the Eighth Route Army looked down on the puppet army, most of the puppet army did not look down on the Eighth Route Army. In their eyes, the Eighth Route Army has only a few broken guns, and it is not as good as calling Huazi, so what can they talk about. However, after more than a week of continuous positional battles on the Zhuozi Mountain front, Li Shouxin's Han annihilation heart was shaken for the first time. The troops that even the Sixth Division of the Yue Army, which is known as the devil's most tenacious will to fight and the strongest combat effectiveness, could not be defeated at all, and it was simply not something that they half-witted devils could move.
Since then, Li Shouxin has had a deep taboo against Han Yunhua's subordinates, and he quietly gave an order to the nine cavalry divisions under his command not to easily provoke Han Yunhua's troops of the Eighth Route Army in the future, which is not something we can afford to provoke.
Hearing that it was Han Yunhua's troops that were going to be intercepted this time, Li Shouxin's first feeling was that he would set him up again. In the past, in order to better control the puppet army, the puppet army rarely let the puppet army act alone, and the puppet army generally fought as an auxiliary soldier to cooperate with the army, and generally did some work such as leading the way, lying mines, and transporting materials, so that they could act together with several divisions This is the first time.
Li Shouxin understood that Shouichi Terauchi wanted him to completely break off the idea of being a Chinese. If this military operation succeeded, everything was fine, but if it didn't succeed and let the remnants of Han Yunhua's troops flee back, then he would be in trouble. In the first few battles, although his troops suffered heavy losses, few were really killed, and most of the troops were captured by Han Yunhua's troops. In battle, Han Yunhua's troops generally don't chase his troops to fight to the death (in fact, Han Yunhua disdains to fight the puppet army, who will drink soup if he has meat to eat), so Li Shouxin didn't dare to anger Han Yunhua's troops too much.
In addition, Han Yunhua ordered the first assault brigade of the first line of Zhangbei Kangbao to advance 50 kilometers in the direction of Xilin Gol, and suddenly Li Shouxin did not dare to hold Han Yunhua's beard, and obediently let Han Yunhua and the others go.
After returning to Daqingshan, Han Yunhua immediately convened a military meeting above the regimental level. The contents of this meeting were given the highest level of secrecy by Han Yunhua, and the military and political chiefs at all levels attending the meeting were forcibly ordered not to take minutes of the meeting, and the content of the meeting was only known to those who participated in the meeting.
Everyone else in the military region knew that after the commander returned, he was anxious to gather several brigade commanders and more than a dozen regiment commanders for a whole day meeting, but no one could inquire about the specific content of the meeting. Everyone only knows that after the meeting, the atmosphere in the entire Inner Mongolia Military Region suddenly became tense. First of all, eight infantry regiments and two cadet regiments of the newly formed 17 regiments were reorganized into the First Brigade and the Second Brigade of the Inner Mongolia Military Region.
The 1st Brigade has a total of 5 infantry regiments with a total strength of 12,500 men, with Han Yunhua personally serving as the brigade commander.
The Second Brigade of the Provisional Reading Force has jurisdiction over the 5th Guard Regiment, the 6th Guard Regiment, the 7th Guard Regiment, the 8th Guard Regiment, and the 9th Guard Regiment. Like the 1st Provisional Reading Brigade, the brigade has a total of 5 infantry regiments with a total strength of 12,500 people, and the brigade commander is Shen Yuquan temporarily. The two newly formed brigades cannot be compared with several other brigades in terms of weaponry and training, and the situation of the first brigade of the provisional reading force is good, Han Yunhua has equipped all the arms he received this time to the two cadet regiments, and only a small part has been reequipped with the saber special operations brigade.
However, in terms of combat effectiveness, the troops of the Inner Mongolia Military Region, except for the remaining seven regiments without weapons and equipment, belong to the two newly formed infantry brigades.
This is not only reflected in the training level and weapons and equipment of the fighters, but also in the physical fitness and mental outlook of the fighters. In addition to the consistent coldness on the faces of the old soldiers, there was also a trace of confidence and arrogance. Now several brigades under the jurisdiction of the Inner Mongolia Military Region are optimistic about the future of the war, and they believe that Xiao Yueben will be beaten out by them sooner or later, and it is only a matter of time.
In addition, the continuous record-breaking victories have fueled the unique arrogance of this kind of soldiers, so that the soldiers of those veteran brigades have a kind of ecology of "use me in the first battle, use me to win".
The two newly formed brigades did not have such self-confidence and arrogance at all, on the one hand, because most of these people were prisoners of the former army, and on the other hand, some of them were peasants and students who had never held a gun, and these people were terrified of Yue himself from the bottom of their hearts.
What's more, most of these people were either locked up in a prisoner camp or locked up in a coal mine by the Chamber of Commerce of this enterprise before, and their lives were extremely miserable, and many people's bodies were already very weak and persecuted, even if the military region spent a lot of materials to replenish their bodies, but a month was really a bit short, and most people's bodies had not yet recovered.
After these two brigades were organized, Han Yunhua immediately ordered Zhang Hao, deputy brigade commander of the 1st Brigade of the Provisional Reading Force, to bring the 1st Brigade of the Provisional Reading Force to the Shanxi-Hebei Border Region, and exchange the 77th Brigade of Reading Force, which was stationed in that area, back to Daqingshan for rest. At the same time, Shen Yuquan also led the 2nd Brigade of the Provisional Reading Force to the Northwest Theater of Shanxi, presiding over the battle between Suiyuan and Chahar and the junction of the Northwest of Shanxi, and exchanged the 2nd Assault Brigade stationed in that area back to Daqingshan for rest.
The 1st Cavalry Brigade and the 2nd Cavalry Brigade, which were scattered in various places to carry out their tasks, also received orders, and the military region ordered their two cavalry brigades to assemble quickly and then listen to the instructions of the rear military region.
After Han Yunhua's order, not only did Shouichi Terauchi, who received the secret report, not know what he was going to do, but even Shen Yuquan, the political commissar of the military region, was confused by Han Yunhua. However, Shen Yuquan, who had always fully supported Han Yunhua in military operations, did not say much, and directly obeyed the order to attack the Jinchasui border area.
In fact, all this is Han Yunhua's precautionary measures just in case, Han Yunhua, who is familiar with history, knows that the result of the Battle of Xuzhou will be revealed on this day, and the Chinese [***] team will be completely defeated in Xuzhou, hundreds of thousands of people evacuated the Shandong border in a panic, and the Battle of Xuzhou China was defeated.
At that time, a large number of troops will be idle for attacking Xuzhou, and if Terauchi Shouichi is not happy and throws these idle troops into the Chahar area, then he, the commander of the military region, will be the end of the day, and he does not think that these seven or eight brigades of the Inner Mongolia Military Region with uneven combat effectiveness can withstand the attack of the more than 100,000 strictly trained elite troops of Terauchi Shouichi.
Therefore, as soon as Han Yunhua came back, he began to shrink his troops in order to deal with the possible attack of the Yue army. Secondly, Han Yunhua knew that the great uprising in eastern Hebei was about to break out, although the uprising was huge, but the ending was extremely heart-wrenching, and nearly 90% of the 100,000 troops in the uprising were killed or wounded. He will never let this tragedy happen again, so he is also ready to rescue Jidong urgently.
Although the hinterland of the Inner Mongolia Military Region is thousands of miles away from eastern Hebei, as long as Han Yunhua sends heavy troops to attack Chengde and Zhangjiakou, then Terauchi Shouyi will definitely send troops back to reinforce these two important military towns, so that the pressure on the rebel troops in eastern Hebei will be greatly reduced, and it is equivalent to supporting the war in eastern Hebei on the side.
As Han Yunhua remembers, on May 15, China's Supreme Military Council decided to abandon Xuzhou. On the 16th, the Fifth Theater ordered all units to break through to the mountainous areas on the border of Henan and Anhui. 19 The vanguard corps of the army was stationed in Xuzhou, and Xuzhou fell.
After the capture of Xuzhou, the charioteers of the Yue army did not stop there, but marched west along the Longhai Railway, and occupied Kaifeng on June 6. In order to stop the advance of the Yue army, Chiang Kai-shek ordered to blow up the embankment of the Yellow River near the entrance of the Huayuan in the northeast of Zhengzhou, and the river flooded south along the Jialu River through Zhongmu and Weishi. The army was forced to retreat to the east of the Yellow Flood Area, and the battle ended.
In this battle, the army mobilized a total of 8 divisions and 5 brigades of the North China Front Army and the Central China Front Army, with a total strength of about 300,000 troops, as well as tank units and field heavy artillery units, as well as aviation units to participate in the battle. On the Chinese side, there are the Second Group Army (Sun Lianzhong), the 30th Army (Tian Zhennan), the 31st Division (Chi Fengcheng), the 42nd Army (Feng Anbang), the 3rd Army (Sun Tongxuan), the 12th Army (Sun Tongxuan (concurrently)), the 55th Army (Cao Fulin), the 11th Group Army (Li Pinxian (concurrently), the 31st Army (Wei Yunsong), the 21st Group Army (Liao Lei), the Seventh Army (Zhou Zuhuang), the 22nd Group Army (Sun Zhen), the 41st Army (Sun Zhen (concurrently), the 122nd Division (Wang Mingzhang), The 45th Army (Chen Dingxun), the 24th Group Army (Han Deqin), the 57th Army (Miao Chengliu), the 89th Army (Han Deqin (concurrently), the 26th Group Army (Xu Yuanquan), the 10th Army (Xu Yuanquan (concurrently), the 27th Group Army (Yang Sen) and the 3rd Army Corps: Pang Bingxun's 19th Army Corps, Feng Zhi'an's 77th Army (Feng Zhi'an and Commander). Twentieth Army: Tang Enbo's 52nd Army, Guan Lincheng's 85th Army, Wang Zhonglian's 27th Army, Zhang Zizhong's 59th Army, Zhang Zizhong's (concurrently) 2nd Army, Li Yannian's 22nd Army, Tan Daoyuan's 46th Army, Fan Songfu's 51st Army, Yu Xuezhong's 60th Army, Lu Han's 68th Army, Liu Ruming's 69th Army, Shi You's 3rd and 75th Army. In this battle, the [***] team had a total of 70 divisions and about 1 million people.
In the five-month battle, the officers and men of the Chinese [***] squadron fought bravely, first stopping the Yue army on the south bank of the Huai River on the southern front, breaking its attempt to join the Yue army on the northern front; Then, on the northern front, the East Road Army was defeated in the Linyi area, and the right flank of the West Road Army was blocked in the Jiaxiang area, smashing the plan of the Yue Army to join forces in Taierzhuang. In the Taierzhuang area operations, the Fifth Theater adopted an active defensive tactic, with one part serving as the inner line of defense and the other part fighting on the outer line. Subsequently, the supreme military authorities, ignoring the overall situation of the enemy's strength and weakness, mobilized a large army near Xuzhou in an attempt to fight a decisive battle with the Yue army, thus making the battle passive in the later stage. Despite this, this battle pinned down and consumed the effective strength of the Yue army, delayed the speed of the Yue army's offensive, and won time for the deployment of the Wuhan Battle of Wuhan.