The problem of bullets is placed in front of Section Chief Yang and Regiment Chief Xiao again, and the three days of free time agreed with Yang Bangzi will be of great use!

How many bullet bags were there on the soldiers of the Eighth Route Army back then? When I was a child, I really thought that it was the same as in the old movie, ten bullets and more corn stalks, but in fact, it wasn't like that, for example, how many bullets were there for the soldiers of the main regiment of the first division?

Take, for example, the summer and autumn sweeps of 1941.

In 1941, the Japanese North China Front launched a sweep of the entire Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region, and in the second stage, the devils focused on attacking Fuping, and the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region named the main force and one regiment of the first division to go to "escort" and cover the breakthrough of more than 10,000 party, government, and military organs in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region.

Before the departure of a regiment, bullets were replenished. It was not replenished by the Supply Department of a Division, but by a mass of supplies taken from his own pockets, and it was said that all the bullets of the captured devils were used.

A regiment of thirteen companies, eleven companies left, and two companies remained. The first battalion and three companies of the first regiment were left behind to defend the army division, and the seventh company of the second battalion was left to defend the regimental headquarters and the sick regiment commander of the first regiment in Laojuntang on Langya Mountain. The five heroes of Langya Mountain came from the seventh company that stayed behind to defend the regimental headquarters.

The anti-sweeping war is imminent, how many bullets does the regiment, as the first main force of the whole Jin-Cha-Ji region, have per person? More than thirty rounds! The Seventh Company, which was responsible for the covering mission, got up at four or five o'clock in the morning and started fighting, and at about eight o'clock, the Seventh Company left six squads to serve as the covering mission. At this time, each of the six classes still had more than 20 rounds of ammunition.

But the withdrawal of the 7th Company left a lot of grenades for the 6th squad, of course, which were homemade by the 1st Division Arsenal. The power of the explosion is limited. The Japanese all-metal "melon grenade" and the wooden-handled grenade manufactured at the Tohoku Arsenal were far more powerful than the grenades made in the border area.

More than thirty rounds of ammunition per person. This was also the number of shell gun bullets owned by the rifle cadres of the 1st Divisional Command at that time. At that time, the headquarters issued more than 30 rounds of ammunition for each shell gun. This is a restriction on newly transferred cadres, and does not include a hard and fast rule for everyone. The guard squad next to Commander Yang of the 1st Division Headquarters, which was mostly composed of Red Army soldiers, had no less than 200 bullets on each person! This is the exception.

The 1st Division can be said to have reached a level close to "perfect", with only the uprooting of the stronghold of Da Longhua in May 1939 and the battle of Yansu Cliff in November 1939, which basically wiped out the enemy. Fight the Great Longhua and Yansu Cliff, encircle and annihilate the unsuspecting and marching enemy, and fight the enemy coldly. The battle ended in a short time, and the enemy's ammunition consumption was not large, so there were many captures.

Rest. The Battle of Loess Ridge and the Battle of Lailing in 1940 were both very flawed. However, judging from the consumption of ammunition, the battles of Yansu Cliff and Loess Ridge, which have a huge impact, cannot be regarded as perfect battles. In the two battles of Yansu Cliff and Loess Ridge, more than 1,400 enemies were annihilated, plus the counter-sweep after blocking the enemy and the retreat of Loess Ridge, more than 1,500 enemies were destroyed, but more than 99,000 bullets were consumed, and an average of 66 bullets were used to eliminate a devil.

This is only the amount of ammunition consumed by the three regiments and one detachment of the 1st Division, not including the consumption of grenades and artillery shells, nor the number of ammunition consumed by the 2nd Regiment of the 3rd Division and the Special Service Regiment of the 120th Division. If you add those two regiments. I'm afraid it will take nearly 100 rounds of bullets to eliminate a ghost soldier, right?

Remember He Luting's "Guerrilla Song"? "We are all sharpshooters, and every bullet to destroy an enemy...... "It's actually very difficult to do."

From the point of view of the Eighth Route Army. In the battles of Yansu Cliff and Loess Ridge, they were still very "frugal". In the two battles before and after the Eighth Route Army, a total of five regiments and one detachment were dispatched, with about 10,000 people. Based on the consumption of 100,000 rounds of ammunition, the average person only fired 10 shots. This is theoretically, in fact, the rifle of each soldier of the Eighth Route Army is not enough to shoot 10 shots, and it is very good to be able to shoot five shots.

Because there are more than 100 light and heavy machine guns in the five regiments of the Eighth Route Army, the number of bullets equipped with each machine gun must be deducted from the number of bullets of the soldiers. And the daily bullet configuration of a Japanese soldier is 120 rounds, and the configuration in wartime is even more. If calculated based on the daily amount of ammunition, the 1,500 devil soldiers brought by Abe Norihide have nearly 200,000 rounds of ammunition alone. How can the poor Eighth Road be compared with the Japanese army?

The Eighth Route Army, which did not have its own rear supplies, could only replenish itself from the battlefield by "fighting to nourish the war". Therefore, the battle of Yansu Cliff reached the point of "complete victory" as the Japanese said, and the Eighth Route Army achieved its goal of replenishing itself by basically annihilating the enemy, and used capture to make up for its own consumption of weapons, ammunition and other military supplies. In 1939, the 1st Division fought several major battles with the Japanese army, especially Dalonghua, Motianling, and Yansuya, all of which were captured on the battlefield. However, the defensive battle in the rainy season and the battle of Loess Ridge in July-August 1939 could only be fought into a war of attrition because the enemy could not be completely annihilated, and there was no source of replenishment for the ammunition losses on the battlefield.

The biggest fatal part of the Battle of Lailing in 1940 was the loss of personnel, and the loss of ammunition was secondary. Because the loss of fighters is irreparable by the relatively sparsely populated anti-Japanese base areas, you can't recruit soldiers to supplement them. Even if you are fortunate enough to mobilize some young and middle-aged peasants to join the Eighth Route Army, in order to become qualified soldiers and form combat effectiveness, you must have at least one year of training and combat training.

The direct embodiment of combat effectiveness is also in the aspect of your use of bullets, the old soldier's marksmanship is good, and the new soldier's marksmanship is poor, which also causes an increase in ammunition consumption.

After the Battle of Lailing, Yang Chengwu summed up in the "Battle Details": "In this campaign, considerable progress has been made in saving ammunition. For example, three regiments consumed only 6,000 rounds of ammunition in the battle on the southern front, and one regiment used only 900 rounds in the battle of Nanpotou (Lingqiu County). But judging by the individual troops, there is not much progress. For example, the 2nd Regiment consumed 15,000-16,000 rounds of ammunition on the southern front, and the 1st Regiment consumed about 2,000 grenades on the southern slope. The excessive consumption of artillery shells is caused by the inexperience and improper use of artillery. In the future, artillery fire at night will be prohibited. At the current level of our marksmanship, it is not yet appropriate to use artillery at night. ”

The "Detailed Report on the Battle" also pointed out: "The collection of shells is also an important responsibility for us, and the military district has long issued an order to this. In the future, ammunition will have to be exchanged for cartridge casings. It is necessary to collect not only your own shells, but also the enemy's one. The results of the three regiments were very good, but the other regiments have not yet complied with them. ”

Another important reason for the imbalance in the supply of ammunition to the soldiers of the various units of the 1st Division is the supply method with the "regiment" as the basic unit.

After eight years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and one year of civil war, until 1947, when the central government came to Jin-Cha-Ji to rectify it, the Jin-Cha-Ji troops took the "regiment" as the basic unit to independently manage their own logistics supply. This small-scale peasant style of management was determined by the scattered anti-Japanese base areas and guerrilla warfare methods at that time.

Some regiments, with more battles and more captures, are richer. Except for a part of the handover, the rest is kept for personal use. If you can't use it up, many of you have forgotten where you buried it when you buried it. I can't remember the exact location of the material after it was buried, and when I went to dig it again after a long time, it was rusted and rotten.

For example, in 1937, when the "77" Lugou Bridge Incident occurred, there was a "student soldier" who had worked in the 29th Army for a short time, when the Japanese army attacked the Nanyuan Barracks, where the military headquarters of the 29th Army was located, the brand-new Czech light machine guns and Czech-style rifles in the armory of the Nanyuan Barracks, and the 79 bullets wrapped in oil-paper in the wooden box were too late to be taken out to equip the troops.

The staff office where he was at the time was using new guns that had just been taken out of the storeroom and smeared with thick butter. Boxes of bullets for a thousand rounds were thrown everywhere in the rudimentary trenches. The commander who took him with him said to him: Don't be stingy with bullets, and shoot when you see yellow (because the 29th Army is a gray uniform, and the devils are a yellow uniform). When the 29th Army abandoned the Nanyuan Barracks, these brand-new weapons and bullets fell into the hands of the Japanese army. On the way back to Yongdingmen from Nanyuan, guns and bullets discarded by the retreating soldiers could be seen everywhere along the way.

There are photos left by the Japanese army showing that many Japanese troops after the battle of Pingjin carried the newly captured Czech machine guns to fight south! (To be continued......)