5. Cowardice before fighting. This is a taboo for soldiers, and Li Xubin's department found that he was in a dead place, so he messed up without fighting. Li Xubin was very frightened when he found that the back road was cut off, and repeatedly sent urgent documents to the governor of Huguang, while reorganizing the team and preparing for a decisive battle.

Second, the Taiping army lost, and the Qing army won

Typical battle example: Anqing Defense Battle

The Battle of Anqing was an important operation carried out by the Taiping Army in order to block the eastward advance of the Hunan army and relieve the siege of Anqing. From 1859 to 1861, the Qing Dynasty army besieged Anqing, an important town of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. In the end, it ended in the defeat of the Taiping army.

I believe that the reasons for the outcome of this battle are varied, and the reasons are as follows: (1) On the side of the Taiping Army:

1. The Taiping Army used too many troops for the Eastern Expedition to Suchang, resulting in a thin force on the Western Front and leading the enemy to attack. During the Taiping Army's second breakthrough of the Jiangnan camp and the eastward expedition to Suchang, Chen Yucheng's main force and Li Xiucheng's entire army were on the eastern front, ignoring the importance of the battlefield on the western front.

2. The use of personnel was negligent, and important generals defected to the enemy and informed the Qing army of military secrets, so that the Qing army captured Zongyang and Anqing lost its peripheral barrier. Wei Jun, a rebel general of the Taiping army, surrendered to the enemy and led the Qing army to dig up the embankments of Luozhou and Xiashou near Zongyang, and diverted water into Houhu, so that the Qing army could advance by land and water and capture Zongyang. In November 1860, Chen Yucheng led an army of more than 100,000 people from Tongcheng to the south, and fought a fierce battle with the Qing army Li Jiyi's troops at the Trailer River, thirty miles southwest of Tongcheng. Kill the corpses of the Qing army all over the field. Seeing that victory was in sight, the traitor Wei Jun suddenly smashed Liantan, cutting off the grain route of the Taiping army, and the Taiping army was forced to withdraw to Tongcheng. The first rescue of Anqing failed.

3. Lack of firm and decisive determination and centralized and unified command in command, and impatience and blind movement. Originally, the important leaders of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom analyzed the situation in Anqing. The Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan decided; King Chen Yucheng led the Taiping army on the north bank of the Yangtze River to march into Hubei through Taihu, Yingshan, Huoshan and other places; Li Xiucheng, the loyal king, led the Taiping army on the south bank of the Yangtze River to enter Hubei along the river through Jiangxi. The two armies advanced in a pincer shape and smashed into Wuhan, the nest of the Qing army. At this time, under the guise of "guaranteeing foreign trade", the British naval admiral He Bo and Counselor Pa Xiali used both diplomacy and force to intervene and obstruct the advance of the Taiping army. Li Xiucheng was not active in rescuing Anqing, and did not take advantage of the victory to attack Qimen, nor did he march to Hubei according to the predetermined route, but he waved his army to Zhejiang without authorization and turned to Jiangxi, and as a result, he lost a good fighter; Chen Yucheng's department and other reinforcements did not form a joint force, divided the troops to rescue, fought separately, were broken by the Hunan army, and did not pay attention to tactics, attacked at will, so that the reinforcements suffered heavy losses and were forced to retreat, and Anqing completely lost foreign aid.

4. Major mistakes in the use of tactics. The first is to fight hard for the gains and losses of a city and a place, and use one's own shortcomings to hit others' strengths. After Chen Yucheng failed to "encircle Wei and save Zhao", he turned to the tactics of fighting to the death. At that time, the Hunan army had deep ditches and high bases, and used the method of besieging the city to destroy the living force of the Taiping army, which was almost fishing with a net. The Taiping army was divided into two, and the defenders inside the city had to defend their positions, and the reinforcements outside the city had to attack the fortified positions. At this time, the smart way should be to make a decision immediately and organize a retreat, so as to preserve strength and stand by to defeat the enemy. Since the Jintian Uprising, the Taiping Army has created a set of flexible and mobile strategies and tactics, and is good at fighting movement warfare, but has no capital to fight positional warfare. Chen Yucheng once used this set of "unique skills" to be invincible, and made great achievements, which made the enemy fearful. If he could keep a cool head at that time, change his style of play, and gallop around Anhui, he could not only preserve his strength, but also effectively contain the enemy besieging Anqing, then Anqing's survival could not be determined. It is a pity that Chen Yucheng only saw the importance of defending Anqing, but did not see the danger of a decisive battle that he was absolutely uncertain about, and he decided to fight to the end, and as a result, he fell into a completely passive situation. The obsession of Chen Yuchengjing, a generation of tyrants, can also be said to be a reflection of the lack of strategic vision of peasant leaders.