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Chapter 1004 The Battle of Western Yunnan (1)

Within two days of the start of the war, the Dian army successively lost Nankan, Ruili, Wan Town, Tongbiguan, Longchuan and other important border towns, and on the third day, the Dian army was defeated again and again, and the transportation choke points in the deep region, Mangshi and Shatu, fell one after another within five hours, and the extremely important Mangshi airport was also occupied by a regiment of the British army. www.biquge.info Under the onslaught of the Anglo-Burmese coalition forces, the Tengchong Security Brigade on the West Road suffered heavy losses and had to abandon Yingjiang City and retreat to the old city to the Lianghe line.

Although Kunming and southern Sichuan held ceremonies to send troops, the distant water could not save the near fire, and the main force of the 38th Army of the Yunnan Army only gathered in Kunming in a hurry today, held the departure ceremony, and immediately went all out to help the western Yunnan battlefield.

European and American newspapers have predicted that the distance from Kunming to Baoshan is almost 500 kilometers, which is extremely far away for the current squadron, and it will take at least five days to a week for the 38th Army, which has no modern means of transportation, to drive to the Baoshan front, and five days is enough for the Anglo-Burmese coalition to hit the west bank of the Nu River and drive the squadron to the east of the Nu River.

The 24th Army of Syria is even more distant from the battlefield, even if this elite army is known for being good at fighting raids and attacking fortified positions, but under the leadership of its commander Gu Changfeng, it will take at least half a month to rush to western Yunnan, and after half a month, I am afraid that a large area of land west of the Nu River has completely fallen.

As for Xia Jian's 26th Army in southern Yunnan, under the heavy pressure of the Anglo-Burmese army south of the border, it did not dare to draw troops to aid western Yunnan, and now the border of southern Yunnan is about to come to the saber rattling, and there may be a fierce battle no less than that in western Yunnan at any time, and no matter what, they dare not mobilize their troops.

At four o'clock in the afternoon of the third day after the outbreak of the Battle of Western Yunnan, Luxi, an important town in western Yunnan garrisoned by the security division of the Yunnan Army, struggled for eight and a half hours under the coordinated attack of two divisions of the Anglo-Burmese coalition army and aircraft artillery, and was finally reluctantly broken.

The battle of the Yunnan army showed very heroic and tenacious, the forward positions were recaptured after several changes of hands, but under the fierce blows of the enemy's superior forces and modern weapons, heavy losses, to the end of the battle, there were no reinforcements to supplement the various fronts have been broken through by the enemy, and finally the whole line was defeated, the remnants of the Yunnan army security division rushed to the aid of the second division, embarrassed to flee back to Longling.

For several days in a row, the bad news of the defeat spread throughout China again and again through the radio waves of the South Sichuan Radio Station, and the whole country was in an uproar, and countless people continued to hold protest marches full of grief and indignation, and all walks of life from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Guangzhou, and coastal cities from Jiangsu and Zhejiang to Liangguang and Guangzhou, and appealed, donating money and materials, and supporting the Yunnan Army in the War of Resistance with an extremely heavy heart. Young students in Shanghai, Nanjing, Nanchang, Wuhan, Changsha, Guilin, Chengdu, Chongqing, Xi'an, and other major cities began to shout the tragic slogan of "rushing to western Yunnan and serving the country by joining the army." In front of the Yunnan office in Beijing, there was a great flow of people, and thousands of young students crowded into the narrow courtyard, strongly demanding that they enlist in the army and go to the front line in western Yunnan as soon as possible to defend their homes and the country.

In the evening of the same day, Yunnan Provincial Chairman Zhu Peide sent a telegram to the whole country, enumerating the charges of aggression committed by the Anglo-Burmese coalition forces, announcing that he would urgently send Lu Hanfei, deputy commander-in-chief of the Yunnan Army, to the front line in western Yunnan to supervise the war, and called on the people of all nationalities in western Yunnan to take up arms and spontaneously arm themselves to drive the invaders out of their homes.

On the morning of the fourth day, the South Sichuan Radio Station once again made a detailed report on the military action of the British and Burmese troops in their rapid attack on Longling, and the front-line reporters of the major newspapers also sent back worrisome and pessimistic news, saying that the Yunnan army, which had been defeated repeatedly and was embarrassed, was extremely worrisome in terms of strength and morale, and Zhan Huanqi, the security commander of the Yunnan army, who had suffered successive defeats, in addition to vowing to fight to the death, repeatedly appealed to the central government through media reporters to intensify diplomatic mediation, pointing out that the British and Burmese troops had openly invaded and occupied Chinese territory in the face of the world's condemnationThe criminal act of massacring our people will be spurned by all peace-loving people in the world.

Seeing that the situation in the southwest was unfavorable, Feng Yuxiang, who was "cultivating and studying" in Mount Tai, finally couldn't sit still.

Feng Yuxiang, who was discussing the current situation with Sun Ke and others, was very excited, and through the visiting reporters of "Ta Kung Pao", "Qilu Daily", and four European and American newspapers, he loudly appealed to his old friend Zhu Peide to make up his mind, kill his relatives in righteousness, and remove Zhan Huanqi, the incompetent commander on the western Yunnan front, and not let him lose power and humiliate the country because he was Zhu Peide's son-in-law, and the people of Yunnan must be mobilized to carry out national resistance.

Feng Yuxiang solemnly warned the Yunnan army: Longling must not be lost again, otherwise once the squadron retreats to the east bank of the Nu River, then tens of thousands of square kilometers of land in western Yunnan will fall into the hands of the British. In his speech, Feng Yuxiang repeatedly and strongly requested the Central Military Commission to hold Zhan Huanqi, commander of the Yunnan Provincial Security Command, accountable for the defeat, and finally suggested that Chiang Kai-shek, a righteous brother, send Deputy Chief of Staff An Yi, who is resolute and resolute and incomparably experienced in dealing with the enemy, to the Yunnan front as soon as possible to assume the heavy responsibility of overall command, and to mobilize heavy troops from southern Sichuan, western Guizhou, and western Hunan to urgently rush to the aid of western Yunnan. It will become another Northeast.

Excited to see the sudden attack of the British army in western Yunnan and the astonishing progress made, Japan mobilized its domestic and foreign public opinion to fully support the British aggression, and at the same time held an emergency military conference of the troops stationed in China in Tianjin.

Song Zheyuan, Shang Zhen, and other generals who had just reorganized the good and bad armies collected under their command were so anxious that they were sweating, and He Yingqin, chairman of the Beiping Political Branch, was even more worried, jumping up and down, repeatedly asking to see the Japanese envoys in Pingjin and the generals of the Kwantung Army, loudly echoing the "Sino-Japanese friendship" proposed by the Japanese, and secretly telegraphing Chiang Kai-shek three times, sending Song Ziwen, who had been resolutely anti-Japanese, and Kong Xiangxi, vice president of the Executive Yuan and minister of finance, to Beiping to negotiate with the Japanese to settle the long-disputed matters such as trade and customs clearance between North China and outside the customs area. He stressed that only by making "appropriate concessions" on the North China issue can we prevent the Japanese army from taking advantage of the fire to loot and prevent China, which is weakened, from falling into the dangerous situation of being attacked by the enemy in the north and the south.

Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, has once again become the focus of attention all over the world.

Countless reporters and patriots from all walks of life across the country flocked to the city, and patriotic young people from all over the country who petitioned in droves, flocking in one after another, exhausted Chiang Kai-shek, who was commanding the campaign against the Communists, and finally had to lift the ban on An Yi's public speech, and after sternly warning An Yi not to make any more anti-Japanese remarks, he pushed An Yi to the fore to cope with the unprecedented political pressure.

An Yi silently accepted it, and at 9 o'clock in the morning of the fifth day after the outbreak of the war in western Yunnan, a press conference was held at the Nanchang Xingying Conference Center.

The experienced and calm Yang Yongtai was very cooperative with An Yi's work this time, because Yang Yongtai was one of the three people in the entire central leadership who learned of the top-secret plan for the Western Yunnan Campaign, and the other two were Chairman Chiang Kai-shek and Deputy Chief of Staff Ge Jingen.

Wang Jingwei, head of the state government and president of the Executive Yuan, was also kept in the dark, seeing that the war situation in western Yunnan was unfavorable and that it was very likely to repeat the scene of the rout in the northeast, and he was busy meeting and discussing with envoys, officials, and business representatives of European and American countries all day long, trying to mediate the contradictions between China and Britain through diplomatic and economic means, but the British, who had a good appetite for advancing on the victory, were not willing to talk about any truce with Wang Jingwei at all, and under the matchmaking of the Americans, the British reluctantly put forward five conditions that were very harsh, including the clause of ceding territory and huge indemnities, Compared with the "Tanggu Agreement," it is even better, and if Wang Jingwei agrees, he will inevitably be poked in the backbone by the people of the whole country and scolded as a traitor.

At this press conference, Yang Yongtai was responsible for explaining the foreign policy of the Central Committee, Sino-British relations, Sino-Japanese relations, and the promulgation and implementation of various administrative decisions and measures, while An Yi was responsible for all explanations on the military side, as well as the attitude of the Central Military Commission and the response to the war in western Yunnan.

The press conference was very serious, An Yi was still the same as before, wearing a general's uniform, all the medals and swords were not hung up, and he tried his best to answer the questions of Chinese and foreign reporters, but a sharp question from his old friend French journalist Dawit made An Yi silent for a while.

Dawit asked the question: What was the battle damage of the general's air force in yesterday's air battle? In view of the absolute superiority of the Anglo-Burmese army and the imminent victory in western Yunnan, will the general change his usual hard-line stance and start negotiations with the British side again on the issue of demarcating the Sino-Burmese border?

Under the watchful eyes of more than 300 reporters and more than 100 representatives from all walks of life, An Yi organized his words in his heart slightly, and then very solemnly reported the defeat in yesterday's air battle:

"In yesterday's large-scale air battle, which lasted six and a half hours, the officers and men of the Yunnan Air Force and the 1st Syrian Air Force Regiment had done their best, but due to our lack of aircraft performance and air combat experience, they were finally unable to resist the invading British Air Force. In the air battle that broke out yesterday, the British Air Force flew more than 60 sorties, while we flew more than 90 sorties, almost 1.5 times the number of the British Air Force, but the results were just the opposite: we were shot down 17 fighters, two fighters accidentally crashed due to mechanical accidents, 21 fighters were wounded, and 39 soldiers were killed. Of the 31 fighters dispatched by the British Air Force, only seven were shot down by our side, two wounded fighters were forced to land in a rice field four kilometers south of Luxi, and three lightly wounded British pilots were captured by our outer garrison.

"Generally speaking, although we have the advantage in the number of fighters, but in the battle is at a disadvantage, this problem cannot be solved in a short period of time, because compared to all the air forces in China, the air force in southern Sichuan and Yunnan is the most trained and best equipped troops, basically representing the highest level of the current Chinese air force, but in the confrontation with traditional air powers like the United Kingdom, the gap is still obvious, but we will redouble our efforts in order to catch up with the level of our opponents."

The reporters in the audience admired An Yi's honesty very much, compared with the generals of the squadron who talked exaggerated and avoided the important and trivial, An Yi was a very rare and very pragmatic real person, and did not whitewash the failure of his army, did not care about him, let alone shouted slogans, to cover up his backwardness and weakness, this sincere and down-to-earth demeanor immediately won the respect of reporters from all over the world, and no one was ashamed because An Yi stated the fact that the Chinese Air Force was backward, including more than a dozen Japanese and British reporters.

However, the more than 100 Chinese representatives from all walks of life who participated in the audit felt very uncomfortable, and they knew that An Jiajun's air force had participated in the tragic Songhu War of Resistance and the North China War of Resistance, and was the most powerful and most combat-effective heroic unit in the entire Chinese Air Force.