Spy Wars: I am the Captain of the Military Police

Late at night, the Japanese army dispatched its most elite night attack team.

These soldiers from Hokkaido were skilled in mountain warfare and moved silently in their straw sandals.

But they never expected that there were masters on Qixia Mountain who were more familiar with night combat.

Mou Tingfang mobilized the last reserve force, a special team composed of Yao hunters.

These Guangxi soldiers were barefoot and could track the enemy by scent in the dark.

They used Yao hunting techniques, setting lassoes, traps and poison arrows.

When the Japanese night raid team sneaked into the position, they suddenly found that their companions had mysteriously disappeared one by one. Some were hung upside down on trees, some fell into deep pits, and some died of poisoning. . . .

The hand-to-hand combat under the moonlight is more like a dance.

The Yao soldiers brandished their unique hook knives, drawing deadly arcs in the moonlight.

Their battle songs echoed through the valley, and the ancient rhythm made the Japanese army shudder.

When dawn came, the Japanese night attack team was completely wiped out, and the Yao soldiers were wiping their bloody knives, as if they had just finished an ordinary hunt.

At dawn on the 26th, the main peak of Qixia Mountain was still in the hands of the defenders, but Mou Tingfang knew that it was time for a strategic retreat.

The main force of the Japanese 16th Division completed the encirclement, and if they did not move, they would be wiped out.

Mou Tingfang ordered the engineers to make a formation of straw dummies, dress them in military uniforms, and place them in the trenches to smoke.

The real defenders moved towards Nanjing City through secret passages.

During the retreat, they did not forget to set up the last death trap, connecting the entire ammunition depot with delayed fuses, leaving a "big gift" for the Japanese army.

When the Japanese army occupied the deserted main peak at 10 a.m., Mou Tingfang was standing on the top of Nanjing City and looking at Qixia in the distance.

He saw a huge mushroom cloud rising from the top of the mountain, which was the scene of the ammunition depot exploding.

He turned to the staff officer and said, "Send a telegram to the headquarters: the Qixia Mountain mission is complete."

. . . . . . . . .

At the same time, the middle battlefield was witnessing a confrontation between the armored torrent and the Great Wall of Flesh and Blood.

At dawn on December 25, Chunhua Town, a thousand-year-old ancient town in the southeast of Nanjing, woke up amid artillery fire.

As a transportation hub connecting the Beijing-Hangzhou National Highway and Moling Pass, although its terrain is not strategically located, it is the last gateway to protect the Nanjing city wall.

The 51st Division of the 74th Army stationed here was commanded by Wang Yaowu, a Shandong man who graduated from the third term of the Whampoa Military Academy. He was now commanding the exhausted division withdrawn from the Battle of Shanghai and facing a well-equipped enemy.

"The Japanese are trying to make a breakthrough in the center!" Wang Yaowu analyzed to his staff.

In the early morning of December 26, the 47th Infantry Regiment of the Japanese 6th Division launched the first round of assault.

Six Type 95 light tanks advanced in a wedge-shaped formation, followed by infantry wearing gas masks.

Ji Hongru, commander of the 301st Regiment of the defending army, discovered that the enemy relied on tanks for guidance, so he ordered to let the first wave of tanks go and focus on attacking the subsequent infantry.

The machine gunner mounted a Czech light machine gun on a locust tree branch and shot at the weak spot on the top of the Japanese helmet from a low angle.

The most brutal battle took place at the Stone Arch Bridge in the east of the town.

Japanese engineers tried to repair the damaged bridge, but Zhang Lingfu, commander of the 305th Regiment of the defending army, personally led a suicide squad to launch a counterattack.

This brave general, who later died in the Battle of Menglianggu, showed his brave side at this moment.

He personally took up a Type 24 heavy machine gun and fired at the rubber boat, with bullets splashing densely on the river surface. . . .

In the afternoon, the battlefield underwent a dramatic change.

The Japanese army brought in special smoke bombs to cover the river crossing, but it actually helped the defenders a lot.

In the thick fog, Liu Mingzhang, the reconnaissance platoon leader of the 305th Regiment, used the swimming skills he had acquired since childhood by fishing in the Qinhuai River, and led soldiers with good swimming skills to dive and drill through the Japanese rubber boats.

There was a soldier called Water Ghost Ah Si who could hold his breath underwater for three minutes and stab seven Japanese soldiers with a harpoon...

By December 27, Chunhua Town had become a maze of ruins.

Wang Yaowu innovatively combined fortifications with ruins.

Snipers were hidden in the rubble of the collapsed soy sauce factory, the indigo vats in the dyeing workshop were converted into machine gun bunkers, and even the tunnel network of the town hall was used to implement mobile defense.

What’s even more amazing is that they used a phonograph to play the Peking Opera "Dingjun Mountain", using the singing to cover up the sound of troop movements.

After nightfall, the battlefield entered a more brutal phase. The Japanese 36th Infantry Brigade adopted the "fire purification" tactic, using mortars to fire incendiary bombs to set wooden houses on fire. . . .

At dawn on December 28, Chunhua Town's defense system was on the verge of collapse.

The Japanese army deployed its reserve troops and adopted the "wheel tactics" to launch successive attacks.

Ji Hongru, acting commander of the 301st Regiment, was seriously wounded, but he still commanded from a broken wall, carving the words "Kill the enemy and serve the country" on the masonry with his bayonet before dying a martyrdom.

The battle for Guandi Temple became a turning point in the campaign.

The Japanese army brought in heavy artillery to bombard the temple, and the thousand-year-old cypress trees were blown into pieces.

Zhang Lingfu, commander of the 305th Regiment, was shot in the left arm and continued to command with his arm suspended by a bandage.

When he discovered Japanese infantry searching among the wreckage of the statue, he ordered the detonation of the pre-buried explosives.

The moment the Guan Gong clay statue collapsed, 300 kilograms of explosives hidden under the base blew half of the Japanese squadron into pieces.

That afternoon, when Wang Yaowu received the order to retreat, there was no way to retreat.

He ordered the soldiers to place the seriously wounded in the lime kiln in the south of the town, leaving behind military doctors and all medicines.

The wounded men detonated the last bundle of grenades as the Japanese set fire, and the explosion was heard for miles.

Late at night, the remaining defenders began to move towards Nanjing City.

A tragic scene took place during the transition.

The 1st Battalion of the 302nd Regiment, which was responsible for the rearguard action, had its retreat route cut off by the Japanese army, and Battalion Commander Zhou Zhenqiang led his troops to counterattack.

This officer, who graduated from the Baoding Military Academy, loved to recite Yue Fei's "Man Jiang Hong" before the war.

At this moment, he stood at the bridge head with a big knife in his hand, killed three Japanese soldiers in a row, and was hit by several bullets from behind.

The soldiers heard his last cry: "Thirty years of fame are now dust and dirt, eight thousand miles of journey are now clouds and moon."

When the vanguard arrived at Guanghua Gate, Wang Yaowu counted the number of people and burst into tears.

The 51st Division, which had a full complement of 12,000 men when it set out on the expedition, now had less than 3,000 men left.

But each of these ragged survivors had a Japanese army helmet on his bayonet, which was the best medal of the bloody battle in Chunhua Town.

. . . . .

On the left wing battlefield, Moling Pass, a tributary of the Qinhuai River was shimmering with gray waves under the winter haze.

This thousand-year-old town, which guards the southeastern gateway of Nanjing, has now become a nail that must be removed from the Japanese army's offensive route.

Most of the officers and soldiers of the 156th Division of the 83rd Army who were ordered to garrison here came from the mountainous areas of Guizhou. They were not familiar with the water network terrain, but they had to block the steel torrent of the Japanese 114th Division in this area with crisscrossing rivers.

Division Commander Li Jiang stood on the commanding heights in the west of the town, looking at the dense network of water below his feet.

"Brothers," he said to the officers around him, "this is where we are buried."

The 128th Brigade of the 114th Division of the Japanese Army launched the first round of assault under the cover of heavy artillery.

The shells rained down on the defenders' positions, blasting the ancient stone bridge into pieces and razing the willow forest on the river bank to the ground.

After the artillery fire extended, Japanese rubber boats began to cross the river.

"Fight closer!" Regimental commander Huang Baichuan gave the order in the trench.