national surname chiming

Chapter 454
In the sixth year of Longwu, on the first day of August, Shanhaiguan.

Since the end of July, the battle clouds in the west of Liaoning have once again spread densely. After five months of silence, the Ming and Qing parties assembled heavy troops and came to this area.

Hauge was just planning to grab one at first, taking advantage of the fact that Shanhaiguan Pass was still in the hands of the Qing army. It was convenient to enter the customs. Once they crossed the Great Wall, they could be broken into parts and turned to other directions. Wherever it was empty, the main force of the Ming army would catch up. Just run away.

As for the main force of the Ming army in Yongping Mansion, Hauge had no intention of touching it at all.When he gave up Beijing City half a year ago, he didn't dare to touch it. What else is there to touch now?Wouldn't it make you feel uncomfortable?

It's a pity that Hauge planned to make a detour, but the opponent didn't want to let him go.

Before he had time to dispatch his troops, Zhang Huangyan stepped up his efforts to garrison troops in Yongping Mansion in advance, and moved the camping position further forward, allowing the Ming army to reach Shanhaiguan Pass directly, only a few miles away from the Guanqiang Tower. That is to say, it can barely avoid the range of the heaviest Hongyi cannon on the wall.

The Ming army is not stupid. Even if they want to block the door, there is no need to really stick to their faces. It is still necessary to leave a distance covered by the firepower of heavy artillery. This gap is not enough for the army to detour.

Seeing that the Ming army was prepared, many of Hauge's princes and Baylor began to retreat.The shadow of his consecutive defeats in the past few years has not dissipated, and no one wants to risk his life again.

So some people advised Hauge to give up and forget it. If it didn't work, he could also consider changing the direction and breaking in from other places. At worst, he would forcefully attack a section of the Great Wall that was empty by the Ming army.

Those who persuaded him were not only princes in charge like Man Dahai and Yue Le (Boluo was injured in the Neihuang War and died after returning, and the title was inherited by his elder brother Yue Le), but also Hauge's absolute confidant like Oboi , has to be taken seriously.

As for the suggestion of finding another void, Hauge is not unable to consider it.But he was definitely not willing to give up Shanhaiguan.

So Hauge reluctantly encouraged his subordinates: "Everyone, don't be afraid of being beaten by the southern barbarians! Before that, I failed successively in the Qing Dynasty because I fell into the trap of attacking and defending the city by the Han people! We think we have won the world, and we don't want to lose the land. The Ming army wants to occupy us. We will bleed and fight for the city that has already been occupied!

Now that we are free from the shackles of the city, and have returned to the situation of the first emperor's dynasty, we can grab and leave. The Ming army is not as mobile as our army, and can't catch us!Victory must belong to my Qing Dynasty again!The Ming army's delusional attempt to annihilate us is a fool's dream!

Right now, Shanhaiguan is surrounded by mountains and the sea. It is not like an ordinary city. If it were a city, the Ming army could besiege it from all directions, surround our army and try to destroy it. With the sharp artillery of the Ming army, our army may not dare to defend to the death.

But the road behind Shanhaiguan is open, as long as the Ming army does not cross Yanshan, our army can consume the Ming army here, hit the morale of the Ming army, stop the momentum of the Ming army with a big victory, and make them dare not underestimate us again clear!If we don't fight for peace here for several years, the Ming army will continue to despise our Qing Dynasty in the future and disturb us every year, and there will never be peace! "

The generals were persuaded by Hauge's reasoning, so they reluctantly raised their will and decided to fight a defensive battle at Shanhaiguan with the Ming army.

After all, after successive defeats, one must win a battle to stop the enemy's coveting and not be underestimated.This is not only for the gains and losses of one city and one place, but also for long-term peace.

Moreover, there is still a heavy pressure within the Manchu Qing Dynasty, that is, their current ruling structure. They may survive without robbing for a while, but if they do not rob for a long time, they will definitely collapse.

When he planned to withdraw from Hebei half a year ago, Hauge was not completely careless. While he took away the Manchus, he also took away hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese—this kind of plundering of the population and making them gradually Manhua's affairs, from Nuerhachi to Huang Taiji, have been doing it all the time.

On the one hand, the Manchu population is too small, so if we can assimilate some people who are loyal to them and raise the flag as a coat, we should carry as many as possible.

On the other hand, the Manchus lacked craftsmen and technicians. When they retreated from Hebei, the technicians in the northern Central Plains would naturally take as many as they could, so that they could continue to build guns and cannons after they left the customs, and let their own skills be as good as possible. Imitate and learn from the progress of the Ming army, so as not to fall behind too much.

To feed so many craftsmen, a lot of money and food were needed. These people were not dug out to engage in agricultural production, but to engage in professional technical work or serve as soldiers for the Han army flag.

If money and food were not used to stabilize their loyalty, if an internal change broke out and combined with Ming's external pressure, it would not be that the Manchus assimilated them, but that the Manchus themselves were assimilated by the Liaodong Han in turn.

The whole Manchu family has undergone many heavy losses, and now there are only about 40 people left, including men, women, old and children.

The core Manchu males over the age of 15 are only 8 to [-], and almost all the people need to be soldiers, and they have been beaten back to the difficult state of the Nuerhachi era.

Children under the age of 15, regardless of gender, add up to 10,000+.The last remaining 30 million are women over the age of 15.

Such a severe situation left Hauge with no choice.

……

In this attitude of not giving in to each other, the two sides started the offensive and defensive battle in Shanhaiguan.

On the fourth day of August, after a few days of simple fortification preparations, the Ming army began to adopt the simple Vauban siege method. From a distance of three or four miles from the Shanhaiguan pass wall, the Ming army began to dig trenches and extend towards the Shanhaiguan pass wall.

In history, it took several years for Vauban to gradually emerge on the battlefield of the French Civil War, but now Zhu Shuren used the fleet of the Dutch navigator Tasman to recruit relevant talents from Europe and recruited them in advance, which is logical. Worked hard for Daming.

Jansen Tasman and Descartes came to Asia a year and a half ago, and Vauban was transported by Tasman's second fleet. It took exactly one and a half years before and after, and they were reused by Zhu Shuren as soon as they arrived in Ming Dynasty.

At the beginning, many generals of the Ming army refused to accept it, but considering that the prince only let this Hongyi man be responsible for the technical work of digging trenches in the siege battle, and had no other power, they turned a blind eye and slowly learned from the sidelines. , nobody troubled Vauban.

The front of the Ming army was originally intended to contain and hold back. It is necessary to give a reasonable excuse so that the Qing army will not doubt why the Ming army "played so slowly", so it is good to dig the trench slowly, digging for half a month and a month It doesn't matter.

The Qing army on the Shanhaiguan wall was very vigilant at the beginning. Seeing that the Ming army had dug for three days without moving, they let the only remaining Hongyi cannons on the wall bombard the trench——

After the loss of 130 heavy artillery pieces in the battle of Neihuang at the beginning of the year, fortunately, the Qing army did not lose the cannons when they defended Beijing, and they withdrew early to transfer all the cannons, so now the Qing Dynasty still retains about 80 heavy artillery pieces. It is barely a usable artillery force.At this moment in Shanhaiguan, the Qing army also bet on the defensive force of [-] heavy artillery.

It's a pity that these thirty cannons are of course completely useless against the professionally designed Vauban siege trenches. They bombarded and bombarded, even if they expected the ricochets to rebound and kill, they still couldn't bounce into the trench.

Each of the trenches dug out by Vauban’s design can accurately hide the advancing routes of soldiers and cannons in the absolute blind spot of the enemy at the head of the city, even if it is only two miles or one mile away from the city wall. The cannons on the ground still couldn't hit the valuable target.

The price of all this is just to make the soldiers dig a little deeper and do more soil work, but they can save their lives.

The soldiers were skeptical at first, but later found that they could really save their lives, so they didn't care about digging and sweating.

After the stalemate until mid-August, as the trenches of the Ming army got closer and closer to the Shanhaiguan pass wall, the Ming army moved some of the heavy artillery with relatively curved trajectories, especially the heavy siege mortars that fired explosive bombs, into Vauban. Emplacement pits in siege trenches.

Then, taking advantage of the high ballistic characteristics of the Ming army's artillery, it is possible to hide on the reverse slope where the Qing army's direct artillery fire cannot hit, and use lob shots to damage the Qing army on the wall.

The ballistic tables used by the gunners were all verified and calibrated by Daming’s own mathematicians, artillery experiment observers, colleagues from the Netherlands, and Descartes, a great mathematician himself.

With the blessing of the most advanced mathematics of this era, the efficiency of the curved ballistics of the Ming artillery, of course, made the Qing army dumbfounded.

Within a few days, more than a dozen Hongyi cannons on the Shanhaiguan pass wall were blown up, and hundreds of thousands of Qing army artillerymen and crossbowmen were also killed.The counterattack artillery fire of the Qing army did not see any direct effect at all, and it is not known whether it was hit or not. It really hurt morale.

In fact, thanks to the fact that the artillerymen of the Qing army could not observe the effect of their own shelling, they were able to consume each other for so long.The artillery positions of the Ming army were all in the pit, and they couldn't see it from the top of the city, and they didn't know whether it was blown up or not. At most, they could only see that some of the shells had indeed fallen into the pit.

It was this kind of psychological comfort that caused the Qing army to fight against each other for many days, and was also unilaterally whitewashed for many days.If he had known that he was doing useless work, the morale of the artillerymen of the Qing army would have collapsed in advance just after the middle of August.

Even now, in late August, Hauge finally couldn't hold back anymore. He ordered the cavalry of the Eight Banners to take advantage of the dark and windy days at the end of the month to open Shanhaiguan and leave the city to attack the artillery positions of the Ming army at night.

Hauge reckoned that he had been bombarded in vain for half a month, and had never played a battle before. The Ming army would probably relax their vigilance, allowing him to make a sneak attack and annihilate some of the Ming army's artillery in close combat.

Unfortunately, he met Zhang Huangyan, who had strict military orders, and Li Dingguo, who was in charge of implementing front-line security tasks.

Li Dingguo's strictness in running the army was unprecedented at that time. Even if he was kept on guard for a month or two, Li Dingguo could take the lead in ordering and prohibiting him.

So the Oboi commando team sent by Hauge ran into Li Dingguo's pocket, seeing the opportunity to rush into several large pit artillery positions, but was calculated by the musketeers ambushed by the Ming army on the left and right, and paid thousands of dollars in vain. Casualties of the Manchus!

If Oboi himself hadn't been exceptionally brave, he would have been shot dead by Li Dingguo.

This time the battle between the surprise attack and the ambush against the surprise attack was over. Li Dingguo himself was also surprised by the decline in the combat effectiveness of the Qing cavalry, and couldn't help reporting his doubts layer by layer.

In the end, it was delivered to Zhang Huangyan, but Zhang Huangyan didn't think it was strange, but commented with confidence: "This is normal. The Tartars have lost so many games in a row. How many veterans are there left? It is said that there are less than [-] Manchu adult males." It’s no big deal that cats and dogs are all recruited as soldiers, and their combat power can compare with that of the real Tartar five or ten years ago!”

Hearing what the governor said, the morale of the generals of the Ming army became more and more high, and they were full of confidence in winning.

……

On the other hand, on the side of the Qing army, the artillery battle failed for half a month. They tried to let the cavalry go out to attack the artillery positions of the Ming army and failed again.

Even though there are still tens of thousands of Manchu troops and tens of thousands of Han troops in the Shanhaiguan theater, people are still in panic.

If it weren't for the Shanhaiguan wall, which was reinforced by the Qing army imitating the Ming army's fortifications and painting tiger dogs, it would have been bombed to pieces long ago.

But even the reinforced city wall was completely destroyed in several gaps at the end of August with the repeated bombardment of the Ming army's heavy artillery.

The Ming army sent a death squad, dressed in forged steel armor all over the body, holding a large steel-clad shield, and slowly but firmly stepped forward to snatch the gap.

The bows, crossbows, arrows, and muskets of the Qing army could not harm the death squads of the Ming army at all, and the Hongyi cannons were blown up by the blasting bombs of the Ming army's siege mortars in the multi-day attrition war. , and even older tiger crouching cannons to fight back.

However, the long-range firepower of the Ming army was even stronger, and there were still a large number of musketeers on the two wings of the death squads pressing down from a distance, crossing and shooting at the gap in the wall, so that the Qing army, which was trying to block the gap, could not raise its head.

Under such a combat situation, the Qing army could only allow the death squads of the Ming army to cross the gap and then fight hand-to-hand. Any attempt to resist the enemy beyond the gap would be baptized and wiped out by the firepower of the Ming army's rifles.

Most of the long-distance combat methods have been abolished, and they can only fight hand-to-hand with heavy armor soldiers in the gap. Of course, this style of play is miserable.The advantages of mobility and the advantages of concentrating local superior forces that the Qing army was proud of could not be brought into play at all. They just changed their lives in a rigid manner, and they couldn't replace the well-equipped dead soldiers of the Ming army.

After two days of bloody fighting, the Qing army, as the defender, had suffered far more casualties than the Ming army on the offensive side. The Ming army had suffered thousands of casualties, while the Qing army had tens of thousands.

All aspects were completely crushed, and the battle was so weak that the generals of the Qing army could only persuade Hauge to withdraw, and everyone knew that even if they wanted to defend, they would not be able to defend.

Hauge had no choice but to obey the wishes of the public.But before he left, he still ordered the division of troops, part of which was to go north across Yanshan Mountain, walk on the prairie, and harass other Great Wall passes to share the pressure.

The remaining main force is preparing to retreat slowly along the Liaoxi Corridor.

However, Hauge is not only aware of the tendency to retreat, but the enemy is also aware of it.

The gaps in the Shanhaiguan wall have been blasted to pieces like that, if Hauge does not leave, he will die!Before the breach, the Ming army had already made preparations.

Therefore, during the time gap between Hauge's decision to withdraw troops and the ministries still packing their luggage and preparing to leave, on the second day of September, an urgent report was suddenly sent from the rear.

"Report! My lord, Zhang Mingzhen's department of the Ming army suddenly landed in Ningyuan in the rear, and a heavy army has been divided to attack the city. Zheng Chenggong's department of the Ming army landed at Bijia Mountain, and then attacked Tashan and Jinzhou separately!
There are also the flags of Wu Sangui, Li Fuming and other old Liaodong generals in the Ming army, which were transported by Zhang Mingzhen and Zheng Chenggong across the sea!The defenders in Ningyuan and Jinzhou are insufficient, and some Han people were bewitched by Wu Sangui and others, and chose to be internal responders. Now Tashan, Jinzhou and other places are unknown, please make a quick decision! "

Hauge is completely nomadic in the grasslands. The Qing army retreated after repeated defeats, and most of the Han civilian elites were lost. The Qing army’s own high-level generals also suffered heavy losses. Therefore, no one was wary of this form of cross-sea landing operations.It never occurred to me that the Ming army would dare to cut off the Liaoxi Corridor on its way home.

"What? How dare the Ming army land behind our army? Is Zhang Mingzhen and Zheng Chenggong looking for death? Isn't he afraid that the lone army will go deep and be surrounded by my great Qing army?"

-

PS: I'm sorry, I wanted to rush to draft a new book outline this morning, and I sent it for review before the holiday, but it still didn't finish.Both ends are missing.

Older books are later, sorry.

(End of this chapter)