**Why do middle- and lower-ranking officers often desert and surrender?
Since the September 18 Incident, the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression lasted for 14 years. During this period, many heroes of heroic resistance appeared in the Kuomintang army. However, we cannot ignore another fact, that is, during the Anti-Japanese War, the Kuomintang had a large number of demos.
According to statistics, there are as many as 58 high-ranking generals above the brigade commander level alone. During the Anti-Japanese War, the peak of ** had 5 million troops, while the Japanese army had 2 million.
Behind these Japanese troops, there are also 2.1 million puppet troops. A large part of these puppet armies were former Kuomintang regular troops. So, the question arises, why did the ** troops, who were full of enthusiasm in the early days of the Anti-Japanese War, surrender so easily in the face of the Japanese army, and even in the middle of the Anti-Japanese War, they seemed to be on the verge of collapse?
This is because Chiang Kai-shek has been pursuing the policy of "settling the inside before the outside", which made the anti-Japanese sentiment in the whole country high after the outbreak of the all-out war of resistance in 1937. It's like a spring that has been extremely compressed and suddenly pops open, and both the ** army and the local army behaved very aggressively.
There were two significant battles in this period, one was the Battle of Songhu led by the ** army, and the other was the victory of Taierzhuang, which was dominated by the local army.
In the Battle of Songhu, the soldiers showed a heroic fighting spirit. In this battle, their morale was high, and they looked at death as if they were home. Before the outbreak of the Battle of Songhu, ** officers had to go through systematic education and training to obtain a high school degree.
And with a high school degree, you are eligible to be admitted to the ** Army Officer School, the predecessor of this school is the Whampoa Military Academy. Although this is only a starting point, if you become a soldier who graduated from the ** Army Military Academy, you can become a grassroots officer, and two years later you will be admitted to the Army University and become a senior officer.
In addition, they can also choose to enter military schools such as artillery, cavalry, and engineering to become a middle- and lower-ranking officer. These middle- and lower-ranking officers had a high degree of education, good ideological awareness, and were very active in the early days of the Anti-Japanese War.
Before they go to war, they usually write a will to their family to express their determination to live and die with the battlefield. For example, Xie Jinyuan, who guarded the Sixing Warehouse, had already written a will at the beginning of the war.
Later, Xie Jinyuan relied on his intelligence and perseverance to fight a beautiful local defensive battle.
In that time of crisis, people did not lose their fighting spirit because of surrender. Heroes such as Xie Jinyuan and Zhang Zizhong stood firm in order to defend the country's territory.
Although Zhang Zizhong was once misunderstood as a "traitor" by the outside world, he still took over Song Zheyuan's orders after the North China Incident and became the mayor of Beiping. Unlike later, when Zhang Zizhong was mainly responsible for fighting, Zhang Zizhong at this time was more engaged in negotiations with the Japanese, and such a role could easily be mistaken for a "traitor".
Before the Battle of Taierzhuang, Zhang Zizhong fought a fierce battle with the Japanese army in order to wash away his shameful identity. In the battle of Baita, Zhang Zizhong personally led the infantry battalion and the pistol battalion to charge.
In addition to Zhang Zizhong, many local armies also hoped to increase their prestige through this campaign. For example, the Sichuan army has always been despised by various warlords, who hope to gain the same status as other troops through combat.
Therefore, the Battle of Taierzhuang is a rare battle in which multiple factions unite to fight, and it is also a symbol of the perseverance of the Chinese nation.
During the Battle of Taierzhuang, the first soldiers relied on their enthusiasm to meet the Japanese army; However, by the time of the Battle of Wuhan, the corruption and incompetence of the people began to manifest themselves on the battlefield.
Although the preparations for the Battle of Wuhan were very thorough, due to insufficient material preparations, many troops could not find enough food and had to rely on digging sweet potatoes and wild vegetables in the mountains to satisfy their hunger.
In addition, the first soldiers also had to face pig teammates, such as Jiangxi Provincial Chairman Xiong Shihui blew up the Nanxun Highway, causing all the grain transported from the south to Wuhan to be blocked.
During the Battle of Wuhan, the level of medical care was low and there was a lack of logistical support, which caused great suffering to both wounded and non-wounded soldiers. The lightly wounded struggled to reach the field hospital with mutual support, while the seriously wounded struggled to find a military doctor.
Even if you are not injured on the battlefield, it is difficult to avoid malaria and other diseases caused by raw water to quench your thirst. In addition, the Japanese army used a lot of poison gas bombs, ** soldiers did not have gas masks, and the mortality rate was extremely high.
* Rank and file officers are deeply saddened by the incompetence of the people. The deaths in the Battle of Songhu and the Battle of Wuhan made them begin to fear the Japanese army. Under the continuous bombardment of the Japanese army, they had to choose to hide.
However, this practice is not always punished, because the related households are back in the army. For example, Regiment Commander Xu Fuguan ran away every time he encountered a bombing by Japanese planes, but he came out of the headquarters unscathed, because his commander was Tang Enbo, and Tang Enbo's deputy chief of staff, Xun Jitang, was a classmate of the Japanese non-commissioned officer school.
After the Battle of Wuhan, the situation of Tang Enbo became more and more serious, a large number of soldiers and officers fled or defected to the Japanese army, and before the Battle of Zhongtiao Mountain, deserters poured in, mainly due to problems of will to fight and poor logistics.
In the process of escaping, some even took advantage of the night sentry to cross the Yellow River on sheepskin rafts, and the scene was out of control for a while, and some officers fled directly with their troops in formation.
All this reflects the lax military discipline and the despair of middle-class and lower-ranking officers. Although ** relied on the blood of serving the country for eight years, after the war began to be calculated in years, the upper echelons fell into the daily life of drunkenness and protection of officials.
From the end of 1943 to 1944, when the Japanese army launched a large-scale offensive, although our party's anti-Japanese base areas behind enemy lines and the Pacific theater contained a large number of troops, it still abandoned the city and abandoned the land.
In the Japanese army Tang Enbo troops attacking Henan, he established a strict rule: "Those who abandon their positions without orders and cause heavy military losses will be sentenced to death."
However, this rule has not been well enforced, and there have even been some bizarre phenomena. Wang Han was "shot" but let go in private, which was not only the audacity of Wang Han himself, but also showed that the military discipline of Tang Enbo's troops had reached an alarming level.
There were even soldiers who lost their heavy machine guns when they fled, and they were afraid to report it for fear of punishment, and as a result, they were taken away and killed by friendly forces. Although the battalion commander knew about this, he did not reprimand, but praised the company commander's "method".
The mood of the expeditionary force was also very low, and Luo Guofu chose to stay in Burma because he was afraid that he would have to participate in the civil war after returning home. He asked Li Nong, the chief of the logistics section, the reason, but the answer he received made him feel disappointed: the people were drunk and drunk, and there was no atmosphere of resisting Japan and saving the country, which made the soldiers feel very disappointed.
* There was a significant change in the sentiments of middle and lower-ranking officers in the Sino-Japanese War. In the early days, both the local army and the ** army were full of patriotic enthusiasm and fought with the Japanese army, so the Battle of Songhu was fierce for three months, and the glory of Taierzhuang's victory.
However, as the war entered the confrontation stage, the Kuomintang had a relatively relaxed environment, and internal factional struggles and high-level corruption began to be exposed. Under such circumstances, the morale of middle- and lower-ranking officers began to decline, which was reflected in the fact that on the battlefield they were about to collapse at the touch of a button, and the generals were demoted like clouds.