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Later generations believed that in the first Opium War, the Qing Empire did not have much gap in equipment with the Western power Britain, and this defeat was mainly caused by the backward tactical system of the Qing Empire. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

There seems to be a lot of support for this view.

And in one respect, such a view does have some merit, but in many cases, it is quite biased.

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There are several main arguments for this view:

1: In the Opium War, the difference in the lethality of weapons between China and Britain was far greater than the disparity in the performance of weapons. The defeat of the Qing army was not entirely a technical failure.

During the Opium Wars, the standard small arms of the British army were front-loading flintlock muskets. Truth be told, this is not an advanced weapon. Several important inventions of modern rifle weapon technology, such as the initiating charge, fire cap, conical projectile, and firing bolt machine, had just been invented at that time, and it was too late to be used in this kind of gun. The rifled gun, with a long range and high accuracy, is commonly known as a rifle, which is expensive and did not become the standard weapon of European soldiers at that time.

The maximum firing range of the front-loading flintlock smoothbore gun did not exceed 300 yards, and the distance at which it could shoot at the human body was years, and Colonel Hange of the British Army wrote a passage: "If you want to shoot someone 200 yards away with an ordinary gun, you might as well shoot the moon instead, and the odds of hitting are the same." ”

On the battlefield, soldiers are very prone to error. One of the common mistakes is that after loading, you forget to pull the through out of the barrel, and when you pull the trigger, the through doesn't know where it flies, and naturally it can't be reloaded. In addition, a common mistake is to mistakenly stuff a bullet into the muzzle of a gun instead of gunpowder in a hurry, resulting in no shots. The soldier could only withdraw from the ranks, stand behind, and slowly dig out the warhead with all his strength. What's even more troublesome is that the muskets are fired in unison, so many guns are fired together, and many soldiers do not know whether the bullets are fired after they shoot, whether there is a dumb fire, and they often reload multiple times and stuff the barrel to the brim.

In contrast, although the Qing army in the same period did not completely abandon cold weapons, half of the soldiers used firearms, mainly bird guns and guns, the largest number of bird guns, also belonging to smoothbore guns, which were fired with fire ropes, and were not very convenient when the weather was wet.

In general, the range of shotguns is slightly smaller than that of British smoothbore guns, and the range of carrying guns is greater than that of British smoothbore guns. The rate of fire of the shotgun was probably not much different from that of the British flintlock musket, which was about 2 rounds per minute. However, the accuracy of the Qing army's shotguns and lifting guns was lower than that of the British flintlock guns. The main reason is that the shotgun and the carrying gun are all handmade, the craftsmanship is rough, and the accuracy of the gun chamber is not high.

We can draw a conclusion that the British flintlock guns fired 3 rounds per minute with a 90% hit rate, and the Qing army shot guns fired 2 rounds per minute with a 70% hit rate. Assuming 10 soldiers from each army and firing at several targets at the same distance, in one minute, a British soldier can fire 30 rounds and hit 27 targets, and a Qing soldier can fire 20 rounds and hit 14 targets. The flintlock gun is about 2 times more effective than the shotgun. Such a gap can be made up by the Qing army by taking advantage of its numerical superiority.

In comparison, the difference in the performance of the artillery of the two sides may be even greater. The main problem of the Qing army's artillery was that the penetration force was not enough and the accuracy of the hit was not high. The lack of penetrating power was mainly due to the poor gunpowder in China, and the low accuracy of the hit was mainly caused by the poor mobility of the artillery. For the same caliber artillery, the Qing artillery was much heavier and lacked a flexible rotating gun mount. It was almost impossible for those large-caliber guns, weighing 3 to 5 tons, to aim little by little under the heavy fire of the British army. However, it was precisely these heavy artillery that posed the greatest threat to British warships. The British army was quite afraid of the Qing artillery, and repeatedly exclaimed "fierce" and "powerful".

2: Why did only half of the Qing army use firearms?

It turned out that the Qing army was unwilling to give up their housekeeping skills - crossbows, and their crossbows may not be worse than the muskets of the time in terms of combat effectiveness. Generally speaking, the maximum range of the ancient crossbow bow is 300 meters, the maximum range of the divine arm bow of the Song Dynasty reaches more than 500 meters, and the Yongzheng Emperor is the strongest bow and arrow of the Qing army. The accuracy of the crossbow is high and allows for precise aiming. A trained crossbowman who can accurately hit a humanoid-sized target up to 200 yards away. With a rate of fire of about three or four rounds per minute, the crossbow is so easy to operate that it is hard to imagine anyone loading the wrong arrow. The only problem is that the strings need to be pulled by hand, and the number of firing is too much, which makes it easy to get tired and slow down. However, when the musket is fired continuously, the barrel will heat up, causing the chamber to explode, or the power of the bullet will be weakened. The bow is even more penetrating than musket bullets, and the arrows of the Divine Arm Bow can penetrate two layers of iron armor, which ordinary musket bullets cannot.

However, arrows are not as destructive as bullets, and wounds are easier to treat. Arrows also have the advantage of being coated with poison or filled with explosives. Therefore, the crossbow at this time was more powerful than the musket, and even in the British army at that time, there were often proposals to restore the traditional longbow and refuse to use the bad smoothbore gun. The bayonet changed tactics, the guns of the Qing army were similar to those of the British army, and the bows and arrows were more powerful, so why did they lose so badly?

First of all, let's talk about the British army's inconspicuous weapon, the bayonet.

A smoothbore gun is a weapon with a short range and low rate of fire, and white-knuckle combat is often inevitable in combat. Before the invention of the bayonet, smoothbore gunners had to be protected by spearmen. After the invention of the bayonet, a soldier who used a smoothbore gun equipped with a spear was a spearman, and a soldier who used cold weapons was no longer necessary, leading to advances in tactics and tactics. When the British army was fighting, it was generally lined up in two horizontal columns, and the soldiers in the queue could not do individual maneuvers, and they could stand and reload in a unified manner, and fire volleys in a standing or kneeling position. The horizontal column is surrounded by a strong barrier of skirmishers, which maintains contact with the enemy, harasses, kills and injures the enemy, and disperses the enemy's fire, so that the own ranks are not overexposed to enemy fire. The Qing army also had to form a queue and form a variety of different formations.

When arrayed, it is usually the heavy firearms first, the light firearms second, and the cold weapons again. When approaching the enemy, at a long distance, bombard with artillery, if a little closer, open and raise the gun, and if closer, with a shotgun. The three hits missed, followed by hand-to-hand combat with cold weapons. As a result, the Qing army was eager to form more than a dozen columns in battle. In this formation, the combat effectiveness is very low. In order to coordinate the pace of the cold weapons and firearms troops, the entire array of the Qing army could only move at a slow speed, and its tactical mobility was quite poor, and it was difficult to move to a vantage point where it could maximize its firepower. The flexible British army was often able to successfully attack the weakest points of the Qing army through maneuvers such as detours.

3: The British army has the advantage of waiting for work.

At that time, the total strength of the Qing army was about 800,000 (including the Eight Banners and Green Battalion soldiers), and in the Opium War, about 100,000 people were put into the battlefield. The British army initially sent about 7,000 naval and army troops, and the maximum increased to 20,000.

In specific battles, this superiority in forces did not materialize. Taking advantage of the superiority of ships and guns, the British side firmly grasped the sea supremacy and also grasped the initiative in attacking. In order to defend against a possible invasion by the British, the Qing government had to fortify dozens of Haikou in seven provinces, from Shengjing (including the whole territory of present-day Liaoning and Chifeng and Tongliao in Inner Mongolia) to Guangdong, and assigned them to each important town, with 4,000 to 10,000 troops stationed there.

In such a division of troops, it was difficult to gather superior forces in every place, and in many battles between China and Britain, the troops invested by the Chinese side were often equal to or even inferior to the British army. The inconvenience of transportation and the slow pace of troop deployment have aggravated China's predicament. On the 10th of the month, the British army captured Ningbo, and the Daoguang Emperor transferred 2,000 elite soldiers from Jianchang and Songpan towns in Sichuan to Zhejiang.

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In fact, the problems of the military system of the Qing army at that time have been revealed:

The First Opium War ended with the defeat of the decaying Qing Dynasty, and China began to become a semi-colony of Western capitalist countries. However, as a huge feudal empire with 800,000 troops, why did it suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of a British expeditionary force that had crossed the oceans and worked on expeditions with no more than 20,000 troops? From a military point of view, there were inevitable reasons for the defeat of the Qing army.

In the course of a war, concentrating forces to the maximum extent is undoubtedly of great significance to both sides of the war, and the strength of the forces of both sides in a battle is one of the important factors that determine the outcome of a battle. The total strength of the Qing government was about 800,000, that is, in the four provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu, where the war took place at that time, the original garrisons of the four provinces plus the reinforced troops from other provinces totaled about 258,000 people. On the British side, from the beginning of the war to the end of the war, the British Expeditionary Force had only nearly 20,000 men engaged in combat. However, in each battle, the actual number of troops invested by the Qing army was only a very small part of its total strength, on the contrary, the British army concentrated the maximum number of troops it could use in each battle, so that it not only did not have a disadvantage in the course of the battle, but had the upper hand. The reason for this situation was not unrelated to the military system of the Qing government at that time.

The military system of the Qing Dynasty was established on the basis of further improving the original Eight Banners system and developing the Ming Dynasty's Zhenxu system and establishing the Green Battalion Military System. The Green Battalion is a provincial and local army adapted from the Ming Dynasty and the newly recruited Han soldiers according to the insufficient strength of the Eight Banners in the early Qing Dynasty and the need to govern the Han Dynasty with the Han Dynasty. Before the outbreak of the Opium War, the Eight Banners and the Green Battalion were the regular army of the country, and the Eight Banners were the Central Army, which was stationed in Beijing with more than 100,000 troops in peacetime, called the Beijing Camp Eight Banners, and more than 100,000 troops stationed in various strategic places across the country, called the Eight Banners of Garrison. The Green Battalion is the local regular army of the provinces, with a total of about 600,000 people in the country. When a large-scale war broke out, the Eight Banners, especially the Eight Banners stationed in the garrison, were put into battle as a strategic mobile force throughout the country, and the Green Battalion was used as the main force in the local area.

However, although the Qing army had 800,000 people, except for the concentration of the Eight Banners in Beijing, the others were scattered and fortified throughout the country. In addition, although the Eight Banners Green Battalion is a national army, in addition to the function of going out to fight, it also bears a very heavy duty on weekdays.

There are more than 100,000 people in the eight banners of the Beijing camp and the five battalions of the patrol, but a considerable part of them are used to perform the daily duties of the palace, mausoleum and yamen. These forces were difficult to mobilize and were not used in the Opium Wars.

The eight banners of the garrison under the jurisdiction of the generals, the capital commanders, and the deputy commanders are relatively concentrated, but one is only a few thousand, and they are also responsible for the daily government duties and the responsibility of defending the territory. And as far as the Eight Banners are concerned, as time goes by, they no longer have the courage of the beginning of the country. Because the officers and men of the Eight Banners enjoy special treatment, they are content to enjoy themselves on weekdays, and their combat effectiveness has seriously declined. During the Opium War, there were not many such soldiers.

The provincial governors have direct jurisdiction over the supervision and standard, but the number is not large, although these troops do not have a clear responsibility to defend the territory, but the various official duties they undertake are very heavy. The admiral is the military chief of a province, and although the standard under his jurisdiction is more than that of the superintendent, there are many standards, but a considerable part of them have the responsibility of defending the territory.

The main strength of the Qing army was battalions from towns to towns, and finally battalions were stationed in various places on the basis of battalions, except for two or three battalions or more in some larger cities, and there was usually only one battalion or less than one battalion in each locality. They are stationed in one place and defend in another, and their responsibility to defend the territory is very clear. During the first battle of Dinghai, the general army of Dinghai Town actually used the reason that his troops were "in charge of patrolling the ocean and had no responsibility to defend the city", and "refused to surrender the city, resulting in the fall of the county seat".

The Qing troops stationed in various places were not stationed together as whole battalions and camps, but were divided into smaller units and scattered in the city, Xun, Sentinel, and Ka. There are hundreds of people at most, and a few people at the least. The most dispersed, such as a town in Hunan Province, "has 4,107 soldiers, distributed in 67 Xuntang, and stationed 9 out of 760 checkpoints."

These were all important features of the Qing Dynasty's military system. The Qing army was so scattered in garrison and so many on duty and errands, of course, it had its own reason, the Qing Dynasty did not have a police for a long time, and the police affairs were undertaken by the army. In addition, it is the "elastic pressure place". Suppress the people's resistance and struggles that have risen and fallen throughout the country. These tasks undertaken by the Qing army, coupled with the difficulties in transporting troops caused by the transportation conditions at that time, objectively required him to disperse the garrison. On the other hand, strong soldiers have always been a major problem for feudal rulers, and dispersed defense is more conducive to maintaining their rule.

The military system of the Qing Dynasty clearly shows that the Qing army is conducive to the decentralization of "governing the people" and is difficult to concentrate on foreign countries. When formulating the military system, the feudal rulers were concerned about "guarding against the people and thieves" and did not leave a large number of mobile troops to deal with large-scale foreign conquests at any time. And the dispersion of its armament and the tasks it undertakes determine:

(1) It is impossible for the Qing army to be used in all conquests.

(2) The Qing government was unable to transfer a complete army, and discretionary transfer was the only way to mobilize troops.

In the Opium War, the reinforcements were sent all over the country, except for Xinjiang and Mongolia, troops were sent from all over the country, and from a large point of view, the reinforcements received by the four provinces, Tianjin, Anhui and other places were hundreds or thousands of troops under the command of the generals of each province. From a small point of view, the reinforcements in one place were also cobbled together by hundreds or even a few people from various standards, battalions, battalions, and posts, and not all the entire formed units were transferred out. As a result of such a transfer, not only is it difficult to guarantee the number of troops, but the combat effectiveness of the miscellaneous armies gathered from various places is also deeply doubtful. The class interests of the feudal countries determined that their armies were mainly used to "govern the people" rather than to "reach foreigners," and the backward military system also made it difficult for the Qing army to be confined to various places and difficult to mobilize and concentrate. However, the British army was different, and its disadvantage in total strength allowed it to concentrate all the forces that could be used for combat at any time, so as to occupy the advantage of forces in some parts of the battlefield, so that the defeat of the Qing army in various battlefields was not difficult to understand. (To be continued.) )

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