Chapter 457: The Battle of the Great Unification

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Xu Shuai, this is Shi Yanglin's latest name, according to the unwritten tradition in the Beiyang system in recent years, once a senior general becomes a division commander, after the army commander, the officers under his command and friendly colleagues often call a 'handsome' word, Shi Yanglin's word is Fan Xu, so now his subordinate officers begin to call him Xu Shuai or division commander. Pen | fun | pavilion www. biquge。 info

However, this kind of title is now only called by subordinates in private, and no one will generally call it so in formal occasions, and in formal occasions he has a more intimate relationship and generally calls him the word 'Fan Xu', and the less familiar will directly call him 'Shi Shi Chief' or 'Shi Brother', and his qualifications and official titles are higher than his general direct call his name 'Yanglin', and the official 'official 'Wen generally calls him Shi Yanglin Division Commander, and sometimes he will bring a number, such as Shi Yang, the head of the 20th Division, the personal title of this year is more complicated, and it cannot be called indiscriminately.

And one thing has to be said that no one called the generals in these years called a certain seat, and the titles of military seat and division seat had not been called in the Beiyang era, and this was not until the later generation of Jiang Guangtou became the chairman of the Military Commission, and was honored by his subordinates after being called a committee seat, and various titles such as military seat, division seat, brigade seat, and regimental seat became popular.

Now, there are more people who call so-and-so handsome, but this 'handsome' is generally a name or word plus a handsome word, but few people dare to call themselves marshal or marshal.

In contemporary China, only a handful of warlord investors are qualified to be called marshals, such as Duan Qirui, Wang Shizhen, Wu Fengling and others in the past, and the title of generalissimo is currently only exclusive to Zhao Dongyun, because the military rank of marshal has not yet been promulgated, and at the same time in order to avoid Zhao Dongyun's suspicion, so no one calls himself marshal, in addition to Duan Qirui as the deputy marshal of the command, he is also called 'deputy marshal' or 'deputy marshal'.

Hearing the words of his subordinates, Shi Yanglin nodded and said, "Since you are ready, then give the order to go!" ”

Shi Yanglin's 20th Division will enter Shanxi by train, of course, in order to avoid being bombed on the road, the 20th Cavalry Regiment of the 20th Division has already set off along the railway line in advance, acting as the vanguard of the whole army to ensure that the railway march of the army will not be disturbed.

Unlike other units of the 20th Division, which were newly formed, the 20th Cavalry Regiment of the division was reorganized from the patrol cavalry battalion.

The predecessor of the 20th Cavalry Regiment was the 3rd Patrol Cavalry Battalion, and the commander of the battalion was Wu Junsheng, who was very familiar to later generations.

Because the Feng army has long used the patrol cavalry battalion as a field cavalry, and the Feng army has been in the large-scale continuous expansion of the army, the infantry and even artillery are easy to solve when expanding the army, but the cavalry is not easy to solve, and the cavalry composed of pure recruits cannot form any combat effectiveness at all, so Zhao Dongyun began to expand several patrol cavalry battalions, but they were assigned to the infantry division as a cavalry regiment.

The 3rd Patrol Cavalry Battalion was also expanded into the 20th Cavalry Regiment under this circumstance, but the regiment commander was no longer Wu Junsheng.

Wu Junsheng was promoted to colonel because of his outstanding military exploits, and was transferred to the Fourth Cavalry Regiment of the Second Cavalry Brigade as a regiment commander.

As the train shook all the way, Shi Yanglin also left Shijiazhuang with his 20th Division, and then marched all the way west to Niangzi Pass.

Niangzi Pass, which is the most important pass in the border area of Shanxi and Zhili, itself is very conducive to defense, and at the same time holds the Zhengtai Railway, which is a place where soldiers must fight.

Wu Fengling, who controls the place, has been deploying heavy troops here since entering Shanxi, and as the Feng army moved south to the south of the Yangtze River, after defeating the Anhui army, it has increased the defense force here, and it is not so easy to take this place and then open the passage for entering too far.

But no matter how difficult it was, Shi Yanglin had to take this place, because he needed to move westward quickly to match the offensive of the other Feng troops who were moving south from the northern Jin region.

In order to attack Shanxi, although the main force of the Feng army was the Sixth Army, which relied on the Zhengtai Railway, it also sent troops south from the northeastern region of Shanxi, and the 1st Cavalry Brigade and the 12th Division adapted from the 5th Mixed Brigade launched an attack from there.

Since the 12th Division was originally stationed in Tangshan, a strategic point that was extremely important to the Feng army, after the 12th Division was transferred, in order to fill the vacancy in Tangshan's defense, Zhao Dongyun moved the 9th Mixed Brigade stationed in Tianjin to Tangshan. At the same time, in order to fill the vacancy in the area of the Beijing Division, he ordered the rebuilding of the Fifth Division.

The Fifth Division of the Central Army, formerly the Lu Army Zhang Huaizhi's troops, since the Jiangbei Campaign, Zhang Huaizhi has completely withdrawn from the historical stage, only a few thousand people remained, and after the Jiangnan Campaign, the only few thousand people were also defeated, Zhang Huaizhi himself fled to Shanghai as a duke, because he did not capture too many remnants of the Fifth Division, so Zhao Dongyun did not reorganize and rebuild the Fifth Division, resulting in the number of the Fifth Division has always been vacant.

Now that the division-level number of the Central Army has been ranked to as many as 24, Zhao Dongyun naturally cannot keep the Fifth Division vacant, so when he began to form a new unit, he used the number of the Fifth Division.

From 1906 to 1907, before the Fengjun entered the customs, the Feng army did not form any new troops, and the old troops were reorganized from the third town, the first town of the Fengtian Standing Army was reorganized into the ninth division, and the second town of the Fengtian Standing Army was reorganized into the tenth division.

It was not until the second half of 1907 that Zhao Dongyun formed a new 14th Division, and then the 15th Division.

Then it was not until the second half of 1908 that Zhao Dongyun newly formed the 20th Division.

In the past few years, three brand-new main divisions have been formed, and quite a few mixed brigades have been formed, including the fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, tenth, and eleventh mixed brigades.

The other troops are all incorporated surrender troops!

The rebuilt 5th Division was used to supplement the defense of Tangshan after the 12th Division was withdrawn, while the 12th Division launched an attack from the northwestern part of Shanxi.

Feng's attack on Shanxi was all-round, in the direction of the Zhengtai Railway, in the direction of northern Jin, and at the same time, in the south of Shanxi, there was also the 11th Mixed Brigade under the command of the Third Army of the Feng Army.

The troops participating in the Shanxi Campaign included three divisions, a mixed brigade, and a cavalry brigade, with a total strength of nearly 60,000 troops.

Compared with the 60,000 troops attacking Shanxi, the Feng army actually invested more troops in the Hubei direction, including Lu Yongxiang's First Army, Meng Enyuan's Fourth Army, Chen Guangyuan's Third Army, and Zhang Guotai's Fifth Army.

Among the various armies, except for Chen Guangyuan's Third Army, which maintained its previous establishment and only sent the 11th and 13th Divisions to participate in the battle, the other three armies not only had their original troops, but also had a varying number of former Southern Federation troops.

When the Feng army attacked Hubei and Hunan, it defeated more than 300,000 Southern Federation troops, and this defeat was not a total annihilation, that is to say, the number of casualties of the Southern Federation troops was actually not much, at most only 20,000 or 30,000, and more were taken prisoners or deserters.

In the above two provinces, the Feng army captured at least more than 100,000 captives of the Southern Federation, and the combat effectiveness of these captives was relatively weak, and they did not take the initiative to surrender like Zhang Guotai at the beginning, so Zhao Dongyun did not have the heart to spend too much effort to reorganize them, and he did not even give the number of the Central Army to these captive troops.

Those old and weak were directly dismissed, and some of the strong and heavy weapons were selected to form four infantry divisions, because there was no number given to the Central Army, and now there is no number of provincial army units in the Feng Army, so they can only use the number of the patrol force, and give the number of the first, second, third, and fourth divisions of the patrol police respectively.

There are no capable officers who are sent to the army, what is the original and what is still what it is now, and the combat effectiveness is the level of an ordinary provincial army.

These four patrol divisions were assigned to the First Army and the Fourth Army respectively, and one corps and two divisions were fairly distributed.

Due to the extremely poor fighting of these four patrol divisions, neither Lu Yongxiang nor Meng Enyuan planned to send them to the front line, but used them as auxiliary units in the rear, mainly undertaking secondary tasks such as maintaining local public order and maintaining logistics lines.

But in any case, they need to be counted in the strength of the Feng army.

As a result, the number of Feng troops involved in the attack on Hubei was actually as high as 200,000, far exceeding the more than 60,000 troops who marched into Shanxi.

The reason for this situation is not that Hubei is more important than Shanxi, but because the main forces of the Feng army are now in the south, and there are only a few divisions in the northern region, and the mobilization of 60,000 people to participate in the attack on Shanxi has already had a great impact on the defense of the Lizhili region. According to the strategy of the Operations Department, the main force of the south was to go north to Hubei, and after taking Hubei with absolute superiority in strength, reinforcements would enter the southern part of Shanxi, the eastern part of Shaanxi, and Sichuan, and at the same time launch an attack on Wu Fengling and Zhao Erxun's troops.

Due to the large number of troops attacking Hubei from the south, in order to unify and integrate the troops, Zhao Dongyun once again set up the Hubei Front Command Headquarters, with Meng Enyuan as the commander and Lu Yongxiang and Zhang Guotai as deputy commanders respectively. r1058

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