The eyes of the people of the whole country are focused on the city of Nanjing, and the leadership of China and Japan is focused on the defense area of the Hainan Escort Army.

As the Japanese army changed its strategy of storming the Hainan Guards, it switched to the tactics of pressing from the center from all directions.

At the same time, seeing that victory was in sight, the Japanese army was no longer in a hurry to sacrifice its own soldiers and fight a bloody battle with the Chinese army, but always used small detachments as bait and bombarded with various types of artillery to reduce the casualty rate of the Japanese army.

For another three days, the strategic space of the defenders of Nanjing had been pressed smaller and smaller, until the defenders of Xiaguan Wharf also withdrew to the defense area of the Hainan Guards.

At this time, there were only 20,000 people in the Nationalist Army in Nanjing plus the Hainan Guards, and at this time, the entire Nanjing retreat operation had been successfully completed, and only the 20,000 people in charge of the palace were in charge, and there was no other way to either annihilate the whole army or surrender to the Japanese army.

With the victory of the Japanese army in sight, the current Japanese army does not want to completely annihilate the Chinese army trapped in the isolated city, and they want to make a forced landing of the 20,000 Chinese troops in front of them.

For the Japanese army, which has already fought to this extent, if the defenders can be forced to land, it will have a much greater impact on the world than the total elimination of the defenders.

In the eyes of the Japanese military leadership, if the 20,000 defenders could be successfully recruited, it would be a serious blow to the will of the Chinese military and civilians to resist.

But in the same way, if the defenders of Nanjing refused to surrender, and even fought to the last man, then the Chinese army and people would only be more united because of the tragedy of the defenders of Nanjing. This is not conducive to Japan's strategy of all-out victory over China in the future.

In fact, as early as the 17th, when the Japanese army entered the city of Nanjing and began to engage in street fighting with the Chinese army, the Japanese troops who gradually occupied the city of Nanjing had already begun their plan of slaughter before attacking Nanjing.

But to the great surprise of the Japanese army, they almost searched the city of Nanjing and did not find anyone to vent to.

In the entire city of Nanjing, except for a few hundred foreign missionaries who had not yet left Nanjing, the Japanese army only found a few thousand lonely old people.

And in order to drive these lonely old people out of their dilapidated houses, the Japanese soldiers brutally dragged these old people out of the houses.

For many elderly people who resisted slightly, these Japanese lost not only punched and kicked, but also shot them directly.

The old Chinese people, who had never thought that the Japanese army would be so fierce, finally recognized the face of the Japanese, so many Japanese soldiers suffered serious casualties again.

It turned out that many of these old people actually had powerful American-style grenades in their hands. Whenever the Japanese army had just rushed into an old house, killing and robbing, these angry old men would always pull the grenades in their hands without hesitation.

As a result, within three days, nearly 1,000 Japanese soldiers were killed or wounded. So the enraged Japanese army went even more crazy, and they began to kill the whole city, as long as it was Chinese, regardless of men, women, and children.

Even if many Chinese hid in the churches of foreign missionaries, they were still forcibly pulled out and found a hidden place to be killed.

Many Japanese troops began to rush out of Nanjing, and they also began a brutal sweep of the villages in the countryside outside Nanjing. Burn it all, kill it all, rob it all, the Japanese army's three-light policy has been staged in advance.

Although Li Tie and the Nanjing defenders had gone all out to mobilize the people in the city to escape from Nanjing, and although within a few days, the Nanjing defenders had reached more than 200,000 Nanjing people on the north bank of the Yangtze River, how many people were still hiding in Nanjing City, and how many people were still hiding in the countryside of Nanjing? No one has a number.

As a result, after several days of rigorous search by the Japanese army, more than 10,000 people hiding in various areas were found in the city of Nanjing, and even more in the suburbs of Nanjing, with a total of 40,000 people hiding in the suburbs, and they all wanted to hide in the countryside for a few days, and then return to the city after the Japanese army left Nanjing.

It's a pity that what the common people don't know is that the Japanese army attacked Nanjing this time and had no intention of evacuating at all, they came to occupy Nanjing, or even to occupy China, so how could they just stay for a few days and leave.

As a result, the 50,000 Nanjing people who were searched out by the Japanese army still did not escape the fate of being slaughtered, and these people were taken to the Nanjing moat and several places close to the river to be killed.

Although only 50,000 people were slaughtered in this life, far less than the astonishing number of 300,000 slaughtered in the previous life, the blood of nearly 50,000 people also stained the moat outside Nanjing, and the corpses everywhere also shocked the world.

Thanks to the ubiquitous Axe Gang Yintang disciples, photos of the Japanese army's massacre of Nanjing civilians were quickly spread around the world.

Soon the news of the massacre of the city of Nanjing spread all over the world. Out of respect for humanitarianism, mainstream newspapers around the world have strongly criticized the brutality of the Japanese army. After all, 50,000 civilians are killed at one time, and it is unacceptable to put it in any country.

After learning that the news of the massacre of the people of Nanjing by his soldiers was exposed, the Japanese emperor was also very angry, and he immediately sent a telegram to reprimand Matsui Ishone:

"Why can't you capture Nanjing? If Nanjing had been captured earlier, more than 100,000 Japanese troops would have been able to block all news. I won't make a fuss until now, so that the whole world will condemn Japan. So the Japanese emperor ordered that all the defenders of Nanking must be eliminated within three days.

The merciless rebuke was first sent through the Emperor's Guard, then to the Japanese Army General Staff, and then the telegram was sent to Nanking through the Japanese Army General Staff.

That evening, the gossip that Matsui Ishine had been reprimanded by the emperor had reached the ears of Matsumoto, a senior staff officer of the Japanese Admiralty Staff.

So Li Tie, who was far away in Chongqing that night, received an encrypted telegram from Japan, in which the news came that Matsui Ishine had been reprimanded and ordered him to fully occupy Nanjing within three days.

Li Tie looked at this secret report signed by Eggplant, and immediately contacted the bases in Hainan and Hong Kong, and the torch plan began to be implemented.

The day after he was reprimanded by the emperor, Matsui canceled his plan to recruit the Chinese defenders in general.

At this time, the 150,000 Japanese troops in Nanjing City had only 120,000 after more than ten days of fierce siege battles. In addition to the tens of thousands of Japanese troops who continued to search for Chinese civilians outside the city, the number of Japanese troops in the city has reached 80,000.

These 80,000 people carried nearly 3,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and surrounded the entire Hainan Escort Army's defense area. For three days, the Japanese army's tentative offensive did not stop.

As for why there was no full-scale offensive? The first is that the persuasion to surrender continues, and the second is that the strong triangular defensive fortresses of the Hainan Escort Army are really difficult, but now the Japanese army has figured out the general parameters of these fortresses.

Each fort was assembled from 20 centimeters of sandwich steel plates, and the space inside was large enough to accommodate seven fully armed soldiers to defend the enemy from four directions: left, right, front, and above.

At the same time, this small fortress was full of anti-aircraft machine guns, each of which had a range of more than two thousand meters. These machine guns, paired with armor-piercing shells, could easily penetrate Japanese tanks and armored vehicles up to two kilometers away.

In a straight line, all the artillery fire of the Japanese army could not hit the Hainan Guards in the fortress, and what was even more excessive was that even with 105 mm mountain guns, the triangular defensive fortress could not be touched without direct aiming, because these shells were either bounced off, or the power was not enough, and even the outer skin of the fortress could not be touched.

And if the mountain artillery that can be impressed is fired directly, before the clumsy mountain artillery can be put in position, the armor-piercing shells of the anti-aircraft machine guns of the Hainan Escort Army will be fired, and the Japanese army has already lost a lot of excellent artillery.

Looking at the defensive fortresses like steel hedgehogs, Matsui Ishine and the staff officers of the Japanese army staff thought of various methods, but they still couldn't break these steel fortresses well.

The helpless Japanese army was so angry that they shouted and scolded the Chinese for not knowing how to be thrifty, and such a good steel was not used in aircraft cannons and ships, but was made into steel ingots as bunkers for several soldiers, which was really too wasteful.

These Japanese soldiers had already thought that when they captured these steel forts, they must be completely dismantled and transported back to the country to be re-furnaceed, so that they could be made into more cannons and warships.

The bombing effect of the Japanese planes was also not good, because at this time, after the defenders of Xiaguan withdrew to the city of Nanjing, more than 100 anti-aircraft machine guns followed.

After entering the city, these anti-aircraft machine guns were protected by 10,000 nationalist troops, and they were hidden very secretly, and they were only pushed out to shoot at Japanese planes at critical moments.

At the same time, more than 10,000 nationalist troops who were also responsible for the work of the palace were determined to die and cross-protected with the Hainan Guards, knowing that as long as the fortress of the Hainan Guards was not breached by the Japanese army for a day, their chances of survival would be greater.

In addition, the triangular fort itself also had an anti-aircraft machine gun for air defense, so the Japanese planes, after losing a dozen of them, also did not inflict significant damage on these forts.

After a few days of siege, the Japanese found that these defenders of Nanjing did not lack supplies or morale, and after using all kinds of methods, they did not capture the positions of the Hainan guards.

It also happened that General Matsui Ishone had just been reprimanded by the emperor, so Matsui Ishone immediately ordered the artillery brigade to prepare for the use of special ammunition.

In order to avoid the use of poison gas bombs from being discovered by foreigners in the city, and at the same time for fear that the Chinese soldiers would be on guard, the Japanese army deliberately chose to attack early one morning, before dawn.

In the early morning of this day, there was only a slight breeze in the whole city of Nanjing, and it was the time when the poison gas bombs were at their best, so hundreds of artillery pieces fired thousands of poison gas bombs into the defense area of the Hainan Escort Army.

I saw puffs of green and yellow poisonous smoke rising up in the defense zone of the Chinese army, and soon spread in all directions.

In the distance, Japanese soldiers in gas masks were already loaded with guns and bayonets, ready to launch a final attack.

They believed that with the help of invincible poison gas bombs, no matter how tough the Chinese soldiers were, there was only one way to die.

Then, as soon as the sky was hazy, nearly 10,000 Japanese soldiers found a dead silence on the positions of the Chinese troops on the opposite side, and the delighted Japanese soldiers immediately shouted long live and rushed towards the positions of the guards in groups.

They all wanted to be the first to capture the huge steel fortress and take a few more photos to show off their exploits to their families back home.