Brief introduction of truffle campaign

As one of the few battles with the largest scale among the 22 frontal battles in War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, China, the total strength of China and Japan in the Battle of Songhu reached nearly one million. In more than two months, China has successively invested in ground troops, including 78 divisions, 7 independent brigades, 3 temporary brigades, the Tax Police Corps of the Ministry of Finance, the Teaching Corps of the Central Military Academy, 7 artillery regiments, 1 gendarmerie regiments, and 4 regiments of Jiangsu Peacekeeping Corps, Shanghai Security Corps and Shanghai Police Corps, with a total strength of over 750,000. There were also eight brigades, including the second to ninth brigades of the Air Force, and 1 temporary brigades, which mobilized almost all the troops in the country at that time. With the continuous surge of Japanese troops, the total number of troops participating in the war reached about 250,000, including two detachments from nine divisions of the Army (equivalent to 1 brigade), the Guo Qi detachment sent by the Fifth Division of North China, and the third and fourth naval fleets. Its mobilization scale is unprecedented.

"We will consume one division a day!" Lao Shenghuan, who participated in the Battle of Songhu, said: "Our equipment is not as good as his. Our air force is 250, and the other side is more than 3000. On the Huangpu River and the Yangtze River in Shanghai, the Japanese army has four aircraft carriers, and the Huangpu River and the Yangtze River have more than 100 warships. How can 250 planes fight against more than 3,000 planes? "

"Our brigade commander was killed in World War I, except for the teachers, leaving one brigade commander and two regiments. Teachers must bid in front, and then they all sacrificed ... Think about how much we sacrificed ... "In those days, Yi Jin and Lao Sheng Atlas, officers of the Battle of Songhu, were very old people. Recalling the past, the two old people cried.

Sun, the commander of the 88th Division and later promoted to the commander of the 72nd Army, later recalled that each division had about 1.5 million people, and finally only 1/3 was left. "Our troops, one division after another, go to the battlefield every day. Some died in less than three hours, and some lasted two-thirds in five hours. This battlefield is like a melting pot. Fill it in and it will melt! " This is a passage from Feng Yuxiang, former commander of the Third Theater.

War is actually a comparison of the overall strength of the two countries. He Renru, deputy company commander of the 26th Division who participated in the war, recalled after the war that at that time, in their division, an infantry company only had three machine guns and more than 50 rifles made by Hanyang. Sometimes the guns were incomplete, and some even didn't come to double track, and even tied them with hemp rope to prevent the bolts from falling off. It's not just equipment that we lack. Lao Shenghuan later recalled a small detail: cooking in a pot. "The marching pot is cooking there, and fireworks are burning all over the sky. This is equivalent to reporting to the enemy,' I am here, you come'. Many of our troops collapsed without meeting the enemy, so they were bombed by Japanese artillery and planes. "

There are almost no natural barriers to defend the battlefields of Songhu and Shanghai along the Yangtze River Plain. China's army, which came from all over the country, could hardly build any decent fortifications, relying entirely on flesh and blood. In this way, the whole company and battalion were often killed, but the morale of the follow-up troops never subsided and remained indomitable.

Take China's most elite 98th Division as an example. In just 18 days of fighting, there were 4960 casualties, accounting for almost 62% of the whole division's troops, of which only 200 officers below the battalion level were killed. The Eighth Division, with Tao Zhiyue as its teacher, is not a unit directly under the central government. When it entered the front line of Songhu Lake, its equipment was still mainly Hanyang rifles in the 1920s, and the whole division had no heavy weapons at all. However, in the battlefields of Songhu and Shanghai, no matter the central or local forces, factional struggles did not shirk, and they all held the responsibility of defending the country to the death. The 8th Division has been in the war for nearly three weeks, and the fighter planes of the whole division have been reduced from more than 8,000 at the time of the war to 700! In the fiercest battlefield of Yunzaobang, the 467th Regiment of the 78th Division was attacked by the Japanese army crossing the river, and 1 Company was all killed in 10 minutes!

Dozens of major generals and even lieutenant generals were killed in the war, and even senior generals in China committed suicide because they lost their posts. After the war, it was recorded in Memories that during the Shanghai-Song War, "our army consumed 85 divisions and suffered more than 333,500 casualties".

"At the beginning of the war, international people generally believed that China could never resist Japanese force, and the war of resistance was simply crazy." Cao Juren once wrote down the views of the international community on the Battle of Songhu at that time. However, China's army won the respect of the international community through such a bloody battle. Captain Evans Carlson of the United States Marine Corps arrived in Shanghai as the special envoy of President Roosevelt in August 1937, when the artillery fire continued. A month later, in a letter to President Roosevelt, he wrote: "I find it hard to believe that the people of China are so united in Qi Xin at such a critical moment. Judging from my observation in China for nearly ten years, I have never seen China unite as it is today and fight for the same cause. "