Ringel arrived in Wuchang less than half a month ago, on October 11, the Japanese army began to launch an offensive in northern Jiangsu and Hangzhou Bay, in the Hangzhou line of Songhu, the Chinese side concentrated the fourth, tenth, and twelfth divisions of the Central Army and three divisions of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the reinforcements of Liangguang and Central China also arrived at the battlefield one after another.

On the southern front, the Japanese sent 4 divisions with a total strength of 140,000, while the Chinese had 12 divisions with a total strength of about 210,000, and the two sides fought fiercely over the control of Shanghai. However, in northern Jiangsu, the Chinese side only had two local miscellaneous divisions, and Qi Xieyuan concentrated his troops near Nanjing, resulting in the emptiness of northern Jiangsu's troops, and the Japanese army quickly conquered Taizhou after landing in northern Jiangsu.

The overall battle situation was very unfavorable, and Beijing also began to be anxious, and sent Jiang Fangzhen, deputy chief of staff, to the southern front to coordinate the operation in an all-round way. The Japanese army quickly built more than a dozen field airfields in northern Jiangsu, and sent about 1,100 combat planes from four air wings, plus the navy and planes at the airports in Zhoushan and Taiwan, bringing the total number of Japanese fighters to more than 1,800. The Chinese side has only two air divisions and less than 600 aircraft, and the entire balance of air power is beginning to tilt in favor of the Japanese side.

In fact, the 3rd and 9th Air Divisions were also equipped in Hubei, Hunan, and Anhui, and there were also the first in the two Guangzhou, but due to the limited number of airfields on the front line, it was impossible to reinforce Shanghai at all, so they could only do it in a hurry, but there was nothing they could do.

The battle situation in Shanghai was gradually passive, Gong Bangduo's 10th Division and Chen Leshan's 4th Division retreated to the west bank of Suzhou Creek, Sun Xinyuan and the 2nd Army Division and Chen Gongqia's 1st Division of the Zhejiang Army held the Luodian line, and the 3rd Division of the 7th Army of the Gui Yequan Division fought a fierce battle with the Japanese army in Baoshan in Dachang. After seizing air supremacy, the Japanese fleet once again rushed into the Huangpu River, and the Japanese army conquered Wusong under the cover of naval guns and began to launch a full-front attack on Dachang, Baoshan, and Luodian.

The tide of the war in the Northeast has also taken a sharp turn for the worse.

The Japanese army conquered Qiqihar, the capital of Heilongjiang Province. And began to attack Manchuria along the railway, on the southern front, the line from Jinzhou to Chaoyang was lost, and the six divisions of the Central Army and the six divisions of the Northeast Frontier Army could only retreat to the line of Luerhushan and Shanhaiguan, relying on the terrain to defend the line of the Great Wall and Luerhushan.

The most urgent situation was in the Far East and Mongolia, which were flanked by the Japanese army from behind. The Yenisei Line was broken through by the Soviets, and the Far Eastern Army had to protect civilians and began to retreat into China. Fearing Soviet power, most of the Russians in the Far East fled to China, and the General Staff Headquarters ordered Wu Guangxin to protect the evacuation of nearly 5 million Chinese nationals.

The Far East, after the Japanese army began a full-scale attack in August, found that they could not keep their homeland, and they chose to continue to resist stubbornly between continuing resistance and surrendering, that is, they began to organize the relocation of important factories to the Chinese mainland, and at the same time began to blow up and destroy factories and mines that could not be relocated.

Most of the Russians who fled to the Far East were full of fear of the Red regime and preferred to flee to China rather than live under Moscow, with the evacuation of people and wreak havoc. The Far East has been reduced to ruins. Due to the fact that the Far Eastern Army and the Chinese Army destroyed all the railways and bridges during the retreat, this greatly hampered the pace of the advance of the Soviet troops.

The focus of the Chinese defense is in North China, the strength in the south is relatively weak, and the main direction of the Japanese attack is currently on the line of the Daxing'an Mountains, and there are four divisions in the Far East.

In order to cope with the invasion of the Soviet army, the troops in the north of China also appeared to be insufficient, but the Japanese army obviously encountered the same problem. They invested nearly 700,000 troops in the northeast, most of which were concentrated in the Great Khing'an Mountains and the Far East. In the northeast, after conquering Jinzhou, they temporarily stopped the offensive, which gave the Beiyang side time to adjust.

It is strange that neither China nor Japan has declared all-out war on each other, and both sides have reserved the way back to negotiate a settlement. Japan's purpose was Manchuria, Mongolia and the Far East. And in East China it was only a diversionary attack. However, the Beiyang government has no way out at present, and the national sentiment in the country is rising, and no one wants to risk the world's condemnation to hold peace talks with the Japanese.

The Japanese army's delay in opening up the situation on the Songhu battlefield made the country extremely angry. It was decided to send five divisions from China to reinforce Shanghai, and the number of Japanese troops on the front line in Shanghai reached 350,000, and the situation on the East China Front became tense in vain.

Linger did not stay long in Wuchang, and he followed General Wu to Nanjing with a military advisory group of about 150 people. Qi Xieyuan, who commanded the Jiangsu operation, was dismissed from his post by Duan Qirui because of his poor appearance, and General Wu Ziyu, as the commander-in-chief of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River theater, unified command of the armies of several provinces along the Yangtze River, and General Jiang Fangzhen also followed General Wu to Nanjing.

As the Japanese army had been marching west from Jiangbei, Nanjing became the center of the new defensive line, and General Wu set up his new headquarters in Nanjing.

Bands of ragged and malnourished Chinese civilians fled to Nanjing from Japanese-occupied northern Jiangsu and poured into the city. As the situation in northern Jiangsu continued to deteriorate, General Wu, after consulting with the German and Austrian military advisers and General Chiang, decided to retreat the defensive line and adjust it to a position conducive to defense. Initially, they decided to set up the line of defense on the Jiangyin line, but due to the occupation of Taizhou by the Japanese army, they finally decided to withdraw the line back to the line of Zhenjiang to ensure the smooth flow of the Beijing-Pudong railway.

At the beginning of October, the Chinese side took advantage of the temporary superiority in the air to launch a large-scale counterattack on the line from Songhu Dachang to Yunzaobang, and the Chinese troops of four divisions rushed to Shanghai from Guangxi and Guangdong to reinforce the Chinese army, and once regained Wusong, but then the Japanese army sent reinforcements of two divisions, and the Chinese side was finally beaten back to its original position, and the Songhu battlefield once again fell into a stalemate.

General Wu Ziyu also had an important and huge task of moving the arsenal and important factories of Nanking to the west, and his German and Austro-Hungarian military advisers warned him that it was likely that he would not be able to hold it, and that he would need to re-establish a new line of defense further back.

Lingel's judgment is based on the fact that the Chinese side has obviously not yet made good adjustments, and the work of replenishing, mobilizing, and training troops is proceeding very slowly. It was only after the outbreak of war that Beijing began to recruit and train militias on a large scale in various places, but the recruitment and training were not carried out well because of their lack of experience. He judged that it would take another year for the Chinese side to slowly establish a complete system for training recruits in various localities.

Of course, Ringel had always believed that China would win the war, and General Chiang's theory was that if the war dragged on for a long time, it might collapse Japan in three or four years. China has a population of more than 500 million, about seven times the size of Japan, but it is not yet well organized to take advantage of its huge population.

With the help of Germany and Austria, there is no shortage of weapons and other equipment, and Ringer estimates that Beijing will retrain and equip a new army of about two million men within about a year, and the Japanese may have to abandon the offensive at that time. (To be continued......) R1292