Under the city of Jingzhou, Zhao Dongsheng, the commander of the Fifth Division and the former enemy commander, was waiting for an answer from Xia Douyin, the commander of the western Hubei town. The defenders found the youth army just after dawn, and Xia Douyin was immediately stunned, but this kid is worthy of being a famous leather bag general in history (yes, it is a leather bag, not a foreskin, in history, this son picked up a big leather box on the way to escape, and then erected a flag to recruit soldiers to be a general), the first reaction was to send a negotiator out while the youth army had not yet attacked the city, saying that he wanted to cooperate, but it took time to convince his subordinates. Zhao Dongsheng was also rarely in battle, and he actually believed it and felt that it was best not to fight, so he ordered the siege to be suspended.

Next, Xia Douyin hurriedly mobilized his troops and entered the battle state.

Zhao Dongsheng waited for four hours in one breath, seeing that it was close to noon, even the Sixth Division rushed to Jingzhou City, and before Xia Douyin could reply, he could only send a staff officer to ask, but the staff officer was killed before he could enter the city wall. This incident later made Zhao Dongsheng feel guilty for the rest of his life, and he was furious on the spot and ordered to open fire.

Fifty divisions belonged to heavy artillery, thirty regiments belonged to artillery, and a total of 500 mortars were smashed towards Jingzhou City unceremoniously. The city wall of Jingzhou City has a long history, although it is not tall, but the cultural value is very high. As a result, Zhao Dongsheng was so chaotic that he collapsed in more than a dozen places in just a few minutes, and both warring parties were dumbfounded.

The youth army was dumbfounded because the attacking troops had already prepared, and they waited for a gap in the artillery strike to appear and then swarmed according to the requirements of the training. But the problem now is that the city wall of Jingzhou is obviously unqualified (Wang Zhenya was allowed to break through it once during the Xinhai Revolution), and more than a dozen of them popped up at once.

And Xia Douyin's dumbness is simpler, don't look at him has been wearing a military uniform for some years, he is really the first time he has seen such a ferocious firepower, and the city wall with a total length of several hundred meters has collapsed in more than a dozen places at once. Many firepower points and soldiers who were regarded as elite by Xia Douyin collapsed along with the city wall, and they didn't know whether they were alive or dead. The morale of the officers and men of the entire Xia Doo-in unit dropped to the lowest point after a few minutes of shelling.

After such a ferocious shelling, the battlefield entered a strange atmosphere, and both warring sides chose to be in a daze......

Zuihou was still the reaction of the youth army, seeing that the charging troops he organized did not charge as agreed, the battalion commanders suddenly went berserk, almost punching and kicking, yelling and forcing the company to charge.

At this time, the young officers and soldiers in charge of the charge also reacted to the reprimand of the commander, and I don't know who was the first to shout the charging slogan: "Long live the youth army, long live Wang Shuai", and the attack began.

Jingzhou City is a typical city surrounded by water, and in order to attack the city wall, it is necessary to pass through a moat dug manually, which is a very difficult thing for the attacker. But this could not stop our youth army, and the brothers of the engineer regiment had already carried the small wooden boats and door panels, and the ladders rushed in front of the infantry, and then they rushed into the moat with the small wooden boats, and their feet could not reach the bottom. It didn't matter, soon the door panels and ladders were laid on the surface of the boat, and the water-based haode soldiers were connected by small wooden boats with iron cables. The whole process didn't even take more than three minutes, and the defenders at the head of the city continued to be shocked at the moment, and they didn't even have the idea of firing bullets to interfere.

It was only when the brigade of young men in blue-and-gray uniforms continued to pour in from the gap that the defenders remembered that they should stop them, but it was too late to open fire by this time.

It stands to reason that Xia Douyin also has 20,000 horses, and if he really wants to fight, it won't be a big problem to consume a few days. To put it another way, even if it's 20,000 pigs, you can't kill them for a while and a half.

But at this moment, Xia Douyin's performance really responded to the sentence that the defeat was like a mountain, in line with the principle of honesty and trustworthiness, Xia Douyin put his most capable troops on the front line of the city, and pointed to them to be able to withstand for a while to boost morale.

And most of the other troops are newly recruited, and Xia Douyin knows better than anyone how many catties and taels he has. I didn't expect the youth army to be so generous, and the cannonballs fell as if they didn't need money, obediently, even if they took this Jingzhou City, a year's tax revenue would not be able to buy so many cannonballs just now.

In fact, Zhao Dongsheng was also reprimanded by Xu Yuanquan afterwards, no matter how angry he was, he wouldn't bring such a loser, the entire half of the base was smashed out, and Zhao Dongsheng was ordered to write a 5,000-word review on the spot and hand it in.

However, the effect of such a ferocious firepower strike was amazing, and in the entire Jingzhou City, more than 10,000 officers and soldiers of the Fifth Brigade of the Hubei Army all grew their mouths, and then made the same choice and fled.

The quality of an army is the easiest to manifest in the process of escaping, and all the people at this moment forget the idea of the establishment, and are running in the direction they think is safe, colliding with the same people who are also fleeing on the way, and then they will decide that this direction is not safe, and then turn around and continue to run, like headless flies. The result was naturally chaos in the entire Jingzhou City, and some chaotic soldiers who could not find a way out actually broke into the people's homes with weapons to grab a handful of them first, and then said, the sound of smashing, the cry of women and children, that was the sound of the ear, at this time, the Chinese are the most unloved group.

However, the chaos only lasted less than an hour, the youth army entered the city, Zhao Dongsheng saw the chaos, and immediately scattered the troops, and searched for the rebels block by block, and found that there was a ** looting, and immediately shot him. At this moment, the person Zhao Dongsheng wants to catch most is none other than Xia Douyin, who teased him. Thinking about himself, he is also a figure with a face in the youth army system, if everyone knows that he actually believes in such a scoundrel, it will not become a joke to spread it.

The division commander gave an order, and naturally searched for the whole process, but he never caught this Xia Douyin.

Where did Ha Doo-in go? It turned out that at the moment when the city broke, Xia Douyin suddenly felt that all the glory and wealth before him had turned into floating clouds at this moment. He knew what it meant that the general trend was gone, and even if he fled back to Yichang, it would only be a long time to survive. So instead of fleeing back to the city to collect the remnants, he chose to run away alone without even a guard. I ran to the wharf ten miles outside the city in one go, rented a small fishing boat and went to Wuhan. Originally, he also had the idea of going to seek refuge in Wang Zhanyuan's comeback, but as soon as he arrived in Wuhan, he found that Wang Zhanyuan was about to run away, and he simply hid in the British concession in Hankou, and made a living by carrying bags and selling coolies on the dock (watching Wang Zhenyu force people), and then the concession was taken back by the Chinese government, and Xia Douyin, who was afraid of being discovered, got on the train again, fled south to Hong Kong, and finally died of illness in Indonesia.......

Compared with Wang Zhenya's seven-hour bloody attack last time, this Jingzhou offensive and defensive battle is basically only offensive but not defensive. Although the battle lasted more than five hours before it ended, the whole battle was actually only a few minutes, and simply put, the Fifth Division carried out a display of firepower and was completed. As for the Fifth Brigade of the Hubei Army, it is really a soldier, and it will be a nest of bears, and it will not even put up a decent resistance. Of the 15,000-strong contingent, more than 1,000 were killed or wounded in the shelling, more than 3,000 escaped, and more than 1,000 were brought to justice by the Youth Army, and the remaining 9,000 were put into labor camps. As for this labor battalion, it was an order issued by the Supreme High Command, and all those who had not lost their labor force in combat and who were not required for military replenishment were to be transferred to the labor camp and served three years of hard labor, specializing in railways, highways, and urban construction. The monthly salary ranged from one to three yuan, and he was immediately executed if he left for no reason.

The existence of this labor camp also became an important reason for later generations to criticize Wang Zhenyu, but at that time, this labor camp did relieve the huge pressure of labor shortage caused by large-scale public infrastructure construction and military construction. This labor camp existed throughout the Civil War, numbering 300,000 at its peak. However, the highest peak occurred during the war against Japan and the Soviet Union, and this number directly exceeded 5 million. And all the files related to the labor camp were later set as the top secret of the Chinese Federation, until WikiLeaks was successfully declassified, and later generations discovered that the labor camp was still very humane compared to the centralized reform camp in Wang Zhenyu's era.

On February 17, Wang Zhanyuan received three telegrams.

Yesterday, the loyal and brave soldiers of our army fought bloodily for an hour to conquer Jingzhou, an important town of Yuan Thief's army, and completely annihilated 15,000 defenders, which was a great victory for Jingzhou.

An hour? Wang Zhanyuan frowned unconsciously, although he knew that Xia Douyin was not the opponent of the Youth Army no matter what, but after all, he had more than 10,000 horses in his hands, and he couldn't hold it even for a day, which was really too much.

The second telegram Wang Zhanyuan had a big head at first glance, and it was a personal telegram from President Yuan Da of Beijing, saying that Li Yuanhong had fled south, and that he had asked to be deployed in Wuhan and was waiting for an opportunity to arrest him. Wang Zhanyuan sweated when he saw this, the old man was confused, almost all of the Hubei army were Li Fatzi's soldiers, and if he really dared to arrest him publicly, the consequences would be so unpredictable.

The third telegram is what Wang Zhanyuan wants to see most now, and the tour of the five provinces of the Yangtze River sent Feng Guozhang back a telegram, ordering the second division to withdraw from Hubei Province on the same day, and the whole division to move to Wuhu. It's still my eldest brother's heartache, and he has followed him for many years before and after the saddle, and he didn't forget to pull his brother at a critical time.

Since Wang Zhanyuan has made up his mind to get out, he will naturally not carry out any orders to arrest Li Yuanhong, on the contrary, he also gave a generous gift to the generals of the Hubei army (no one dares to see anyone at this time, they are afraid of black guns). It means that the mountains and rivers meet, and there is a line of life. The generals of the Hubei army were also reluctant to merge with the Beiyang Second Division, so they naturally sent it out of the country as a gift.

On February 23, Wang Zhanyuan's Beiyang Second Division was evacuated from the Wuhan area of Hubei Province, at which time Xu Yuanquan's first assault group arrived in Caidian, and Wan Yaohuang's second assault group arrived in Jiangxia, less than 30 miles away from Wuhan.

The next day, Li Yuanhong, with the support of the old Hubei army, sent a telegram to the whole country, declaring the independence of Hubei and opposing Yuan.