In July of the fifth year of Tepu (the fourth year of Ming Chongzhen), Huang Taiji personally led 50,000 elite soldiers of the Eight Banners to attack Dalinghe City. This time, Huang Taiji changed the previous frontal attack and adopted a new way of siege reinforcements. Stratagem. After more than 100 days of fierce fighting, the Houjin finally captured the Daling River, and the defender Zu Dashou surrendered to the Qing Dynasty.
In the Liaodong Campaign at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the Battle of Daling River was not the most prominent in terms of scale and intensity. But for Huang Taiji, the battle of the Daling River was of great strategic significance. It accumulated important experience for the key battles of the Qing army, which had a direct impact on the decisive battle of Songjin in the future.
Nurhachi and Huang Taiji's father and son suffered heavy losses in Ningjin.
In the third year of Tianming, Nurhachi vowed to defeat the Ming Dynasty with seven hatreds. The following year, the Fourth Army, which mobilized 470,000 troops in the Ming Dynasty, eliminated the Jin Empress regime in one fell swoop. This is the famous "Battle of Sarhu" in history.
In the fourth year of Tianming, after the defeat of the Ming army, the Jin Dynasty took the initiative. Nurhachi personally led his army to attack Kaiyuan, Tieling, Fushun, Qinghe and other cities. Two years later, Houjin conquered the two important towns of Shenyang and Liaoyang. So far, more than 50 villages and more than 70 large and small cities in eastern Liaoning have returned to Houjin.
In the seventh year of the Mandate of Heaven, Houjin once again conquered Guangning and Yizhou, and advanced the front line to the Daling River. According to the original deployment of the Ming army, the defense of Liaodong was mainly concentrated in the four towns of Liao, Guangzhou, Guan, and Ning. Due to the loss of Liaoyang and Guangning, the Ming army had to shrink the defensive line, and then increase troops in Ningyuan and Jinzhou to consolidate the Shanhaiguan.
Nurhachi is good at using soldiers and has a strategy. He started the army in the eleventh year of Wanli, had thirteen sets of armor, and did not taste defeat for decades. Therefore, he was arrogant and arrogant, believing that the Eight Banners Iron Cavalry was invincible and could capture Ningyuan and Jinzhou in a short time.
In the first month of the eleventh year of Tianming, Nurha Chi poured out of the nest and led the eight banners of 130,000 (known as 200,000) to attack Ningyuan. At this time, the defenders of Ningyuan City were only 20,000 old and young, but the battle of Ningyuan became Nurhachi's final victory. Houjin was defeated, and Nurhachi himself was seriously injured by artillery fire. In August of that year, he died of anger.
After Huang Taiji succeeded to the throne, he was determined to avenge his father Khan. In May of the first year of Tiancong, he led more than 100,000 banners to attack Ningyuan and Jinzhou, but was defeated by Yuan Chonghuan.
If the defeat of Nurhachi in the Battle of Ningyuan was still a light enemy, then the defeat of Huang Taiji undoubtedly exposed the fact that the Eight Banners were longer than the field battle and shorter than the siege. Even Huang Taiji himself said with emotion: "The Southern Dynasty is not allowed to fight in the wilderness;If we hold Yingcheng, it will be difficult for our country to conquer. ”
If Ningyuan and Jinzhou cannot be conquered, Huang Taiji will not be able to set foot in Shanhaiguan, let alone achieve the goal. Unite. The target is the Central Plains.
The failure of the Houjin regime to make substantial progress at the military level, and the various mistakes made by Nurhachi in his later years in power led to a series of internal crises in the Houjin. The people were in dire straits, production declined, the Han revolted, the Mongols revolted. North Korea at both ends.
In the years that followed, the Houjin repeatedly destroyed border towns, entered the customs and burned them, ravaged the land and people, and even came under the walls of Beijing. However, these military actions did not cause substantial harm to the Ming Dynasty. This was because the Ming Dynasty still had a strong defensive line on the Ningjin front outside the Shanhai Pass. The people of the Eight Banners were free to come and go, but they did not dare to stay for a long time because they were afraid of Guan Ning's cavalry.
Therefore, the biggest problem faced by Huang Taiji is that if you don't break through the Shanhaiguan, you can't gain a foothold outside the customsIn order to break through Shanhaiguan, it is necessary to seize the defensive lines of Ning and Jin. Due to the temporary inability to conquer Ning and Jin, Huang Taiji decided to attack the Daling River first and destroy Jinzhou.
Battle of the Great Ling River.
As early as the seventh year of the Apocalypse (1627), when the Ming Dynasty built Jinzhou City in order to consolidate the Liaodong defense line, it also built large and small Linghe Cities as the front line of Jinzhou Line.
The Ming army of the Celestial Dynasty fought with the Later Jin at the Daling River, and the city walls were seriously damaged. When Yuan Chonghuan was in charge of the government in Liaodong, General Zu Dashou proposed to build Dalinghe City again, but progress was very slow. When Tiancong was five years old, the Great Wall of the Great Wall of the Great Ling River had not yet been fully completed.
For Huang Taiji, the Ming army's continuous strengthening of the defense of the Daling River was a very worrying thing. After the completion of the Daling River city wall, it will be the second Jinzhou city. The threat of the post-Kim regime is self-evident.
At the beginning of August of the fifth year of Tiancong, the army of 50,000 Eight Banners arrived at the Daling River. Zu Dashou personally led more than 14,000 cavalry and infantry to garrison Dalinghe City. There were more than 10,000 civilians in the city, about 30,000 in total.
Huang Taiji suffered a lot in Ningyuan and Jinzhou. Before the expedition, he ordered his troops to change the previous tactics of attacking the city and trying to conquer the Daling River with the strategy of siege reinforcements.
During the siege, the Qing army general Turai was in a hurry and disobeyed military orders. During the attack, they were heavily bombarded by Ming artillery. The Qing army was more than 1,000 people. Turai himself was seriously injured and nearly died.
With this lesson, the Qing army besieged but did not attack, and only engaged the Ming army when they left the city. During the siege of more than 100 days, the two armies fought dozens of times.
A large number of artillery pieces were deployed in Dalinghe, but the logistics supply was insufficient. By September, the city was running out of food and munitions. Countless soldiers and civilians died of starvation. Historical records record that people eat people.
In early September, the Ming army mobilized 7,000 reinforcements from Guannai. Huang Taiji personally led two elite yellow flags to block the attack. The reinforcements were defeated and retreated to Jinzhou. On September 24, the overseer Zhang Chun, the commander-in-chief Wu Xiang and others led 40,000 infantry to reinforce the Daling River. But it was ambushed by 28,000 bannermen, and the Ming army of 40,000 was defeated in one day.
The rout of the two volunteer armies made the situation in Dalinghe even more critical. With no hope of relief and no food in the city, Zu Dashou and 10,000 defenders surrendered to the Qing Dynasty.
The Battle of the Daling River allowed the Qing army to explore a new set of tactics, which had a profound impact. After Zu Dashou surrendered to the Qing Dynasty, the Qing army did not enter the city of Dalinghe, but destroyed it and returned to Shenyang.
It can be seen that the purpose of Huang Taiji's siege of Daling River was not to capture the city. The focus is on trying the implementation of new tactics. The results showed that the siege reinforcements later became the magic weapon of the Qing army in the decisive battle of Songjin.
Secondly, in the Battle of the Daling River, the Qing army tried a new type of artillery on the battlefield for the first time. Tiancong reigned for five years, which was the first year after the birth of the "Red Cannon" in the Later Jin Dynasty. From then on, the Qing army was able to engage in artillery battles of the same intensity with the Ming army on the battlefield, so that the advantage of the Ming army no longer existed.
As the Ming military department later said: "Firearms are a Chinese art, but those who master them are slaves, and I don't need to take precautions to curb their future madness."
In the fifth year of Chongde, the Qing army repeated its old tricks, and with the support of more than 40 red cannons, it besieged the city again for reinforcements and captured Hong Chengchou alive in Songshan. After the decisive battle of Songjin, the elite of the Ming army was lost, and there was no way to prevent the Qing army from entering the pass.