As soon as Feng Shengfa and Xu Shijiu withdrew their troops from Anting, Li Fangliang, commander of the engineer battalion of the 14th Division, ordered the Anting Highway Bridge to be blown up.

On this day, more than 500,000 people from more than 80 divisions left behind from Taicang, Nanxiang, Beixinjing, Nanshi, and Pudong had basically passed through Anting, and there were basically no formed units behind the 58 th Division, only scattered officers and men who were disabled or sick due to wounds, and some broken troops who had been separated from the troops.

On this day, the Japanese army has been divided into three routes, the middle road along the Shanghai-Nanjing highway, biting the butt of the Chinese army to catch up, the left side of the Japanese army has captured the southeast shore of Taihu Pingwang, the right side of the Japanese army has also approached Changshu, the first national defense line built by the national government has been left behind by the Japanese army.

On this day, the 80 or so divisions of the Nationalist Army that had just been left behind from the Songhu battlefield were tired and hungry, and they were extremely short of weapons, ammunition, and medicine, and the officers and men had neither the fighting spirit nor the fighting spirit; if the Japanese troops on the left and right launched a centripetal attack on Wu County (Suzhou) on the east bank of Taihu Lake, the Nationalist Army would absolutely not be able to resist it, and eventually these 80 divisions would certainly be surrounded and annihilated by the Japanese army near Wu County.

However, fortunately, such a thing did not happen, the Japanese army on the left, that is, the commander of the 10th Army, Yanagawa Heisuke, did not take the order of the commander of the Central China Front Matsui Shigen seriously, and after the 18th Division captured Pingwang, Yanagawa Heisuke did not order it to go north to attack Wu County, but ordered it to continue to move west to attack Nanxun to threaten Wuxing.

Obviously, the ambition of the old devil Yanagawa Heisuke is much greater than that of Matsui Shigen, who only wants to encircle and annihilate the main force of the national army in the area east of Wu County, and does not think of crossing the termination line set by the base camp, but the old devil Yanagawa tries to draw a larger encirclement on the map, bypassing the south bank of Taihu Lake with the Tenth Army, passing through Changxing, Guangde, and Yixing, and then using the navy to trace the Yangtze River westward, sealing and locking the northwest river of Nanjing, and then encircling the main force of the national army in Nanjing.

The 11th and 13th Divisions of the Japanese Army, which had already exhausted the veteran divisions, encountered a new opponent near Changshu, and this new opponent was the New Fourth Army, which was reorganized from the Red Army guerrillas in the seven provinces south of the Yangtze River.

Although the number of the New Fourth Army was small, it pursued a set of tactics that were completely different from the national army, which made the Japanese army very uncomfortable, resulting in the progress of the war was very slow, and it was not until November 19 that Changshu was captured.

Of course, if Yanagawa Heisuke's strategy can be successfully realized, then the hundreds of thousands of national troops left behind from the Songhu battlefield will still be surrounded by the Japanese army near Nanjing, but Yanagawa Heisuke also encountered a new opponent on the Changxing, Si'an, and Guangde lines on the south bank of Taihu Lake, and this new opponent is the Sichuan army.

Although the weapons and equipment of the Sichuan army are poor, and most of the officers and soldiers are still wearing single clothes and straw shoes in the winter, and the homespun military uniforms on their bodies are also tattered, similar to beggars, but the morale of the Sichuan army is very high, from the army, the division commander to the big head soldiers, everyone is proud of fighting the national war, and the will to fight is strong, which is similar to the Central Central Army that has just set foot on the Songhu battlefield.

And Yanagawa Heisuke's 10th Army has basically not encountered decent resistance since the landing of Jinshanwei, and Xiao Hi's tense nerves relaxed suddenly, they thought that they could easily hit Nanjing by burning and plundering all the way, but they ran headlong into the Sichuan army and were caught off guard.

The Sichuan army really created a miracle on the Guangde battlefield!

The Japanese navy was also stubbornly resisted by the navy of the Chinese navy at the Jiangyin fortress, and it was unable to trace the river for a long time.

By the time Commander Rao Guohua was killed, the Japanese army finally captured Guangde Ricun, and it was already November 30, and the more than 80 main divisions left behind from the Songhu battlefield on this day, except for a few left-behind troops such as the Teaching Corps of the Central Military Academy and the 36th Division, the rest of the troops had all retreated to Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui for rectification.

But that's all for later, so let's not talk about it for now.

In addition, the headquarters of the 58th Division and the 19th Brigade retreated along the Kunhu Highway in the direction of Kunshan, and were bombed indiscriminately and strafed by Japanese bombers on the way, but fortunately, Feng Shengfa and Xu 19 were very experienced, and as soon as the Japanese bombers appeared, they immediately ordered the troops to enter the ditches on the side of the road to hide, and did not let the troops hide in the woods stupidly

As a result, the Japanese bombers all threw bombs into the woods, and almost all the aerial bombs exploded in the air, and they could not even find a dead end, and the Nationalist troops who hid in the woods suffered heavy casualties, while the officers and men of the 58th Division and the 19th Brigade hid in the ditches on the side of the road before the Japanese bombers entered the strafing angle, and the casualties were negligible.

After the Japanese bombers flew away, the road was already a mess.

As far as the eye can see, there are corpses everywhere on the highway and in the grass on the side of the road, there are soldiers of the national army, there are also civilians who have fled, some have just been killed by the bombing, and blood has flowed all over the ground, some have been dead for many days, and the corpses have begun to stink, and some soldiers of the national army did not die of the Japanese bombing, but died of illness.

Disease, for the officers and men of the national army, is second only to the Japanese guns and cannons!

People eat whole grains, nothing is a year and they still have headaches and brain fever several times, so in high-intensity battles, it is not uncommon for the soldiers of the national army to fall ill, due to the lack of sufficient anti-inflammatory drugs, even after an inch of hot sand, or a little skin on the knee, the result is likely to be fatal.

The 19th Brigade retreated from Anting along the Kunshan-Shanghai Highway to Kunshan, and there were wounded people lying on the road waiting for death everywhere along the way, many of the wounded were not seriously injured, either the quilt was not bounced in the arms and legs and drilled a small eye, or the shrapnel rubbed a little skin, and as a result, the wound was infected, and then there was a fever, and then there was no then, the commander fled, the robe was lost, and the only thing they could do was to lie on the road and wait for death.

Many of the wounded died in this way.

In the Battle of Songhu, the casualties of the national army were as high as 300,000, and about 150,000 were killed, of which less than 50,000 soldiers of the national army were directly killed on the battlefield, and the remaining more than 100,000 were wounded.

Feng Shengfa and Xu Shijiu were also helpless about these wounded who had fallen behind, because many officers and soldiers of the 58th Division and the 19th Brigade were also injured and sick, and their manpower was still too busy to take care of their wounded, so where could they spare manpower to save these wounded who were waiting to die on the roadside?

Feng Shengfa, who was walking beside Xu Shijiu, sighed and said gloomily: "If we could have left ten to twenty divisions on the Wufu Line as a strategic general reserve, how good would it be?" "If 10 to 20 divisions had been left on the Wufu line, they would have been able to move out of Taicang and Kunshan to meet at this time, and the great rout would not have happened, and the losses of the national army would have been much smaller.

Xu Shijiu was speechless, he believed that Chairman Jiang would definitely regret it at this moment.

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Chairman Chiang did regret it.

Chairman Chiang has already been to Suzhou to express his condolences to the first batch of troops left behind from the Songhu battlefield, this unit is the 88th Division, the 88th Division, which was in high spirits and opened the Shangsonghu battlefield, has completely changed into a different situation this day, first of all, the personnel are not in order, there are very few veterans, the vast majority of them are strong men who have just been replenished and have not even touched the guns, and secondly, the equipment is not in order, the Jishu equipment has been lost, there are few light and heavy machine guns left, many officers and soldiers have even lost their guns, and again they are mentally exhausted. The vast majority of the officers and men were sad and glazed-eyed, and Zuihou was tired and sick, and many officers and soldiers were sick, and there was a wail in the shelter.

Even the 88th Division, known as the "Royal Forest Army", has become like this, and other divisions can be imagined.

If the sun could not turn back and give him the opportunity to fight the Battle of Songhu again, he would never have listened to the deception of the old German man in Falkenhausen and threw all the main forces of the Nationalist army into the suburbs of Shanghai to fight a strategic decisive battle with the Japanese army.

However, it is a pity that it is impossible to reverse the evening light, and there is no regret medicine in this world, so Chairman Jiang has to drink the bitter wine he brews, and he also has to face the bad situation after the defeat of Songhu, and the national army that has been defeated from the Songhu battlefield is no longer possible to be in Wufu and Xicheng line, and Nanjing has become a strategic death!

When the hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops on the Songhu battlefield were retreating in great strides, Chairman Chiang convened three successive staff meetings to discuss whether or not to defend Nanjing.

Liu Fei's point of view is undoubtedly correct, the 500,000 national troops defeated from the Songhu battlefield have reached the limit of physical strength and energy, and their morale is depressed, and what they need most at the moment is to rest and recuperate, rather than letting them stay in Nanjing and continue to fight to the death with the Japanese army, which is a great waste of military strength.

However, Tang Shengzhi thinks that Nanjing is the mausoleum of the "first general manager", and it should be heavily defended!

Chairman Chiang finally adopted Tang Shengzhi's opinion, and forced Tang Shengzhi to take the initiative to ask Ying to take the heavy responsibility of the commander of the Nanjing garrison, and then Chairman Chiang began to arrest troops everywhere, in addition to the teaching corps of the Central Military Academy and the gendarmerie corps, the 7L Army, the 72nd Army, the 78th Army, the 66th Army, the 74th Army, and the 88th Army were successively assigned to the garrison headquarters, and Zuihou even transferred Xu Yuanquan's 2nd Army from Hubei.

At this time, Chairman Chiang did not know that the more than a dozen divisions and more than 100,000 national troops left behind by him in Nanjing were about to suffer an unprecedented tragic fate, and an unprecedented national martyrdom had already begun.