As one of the largest battles among the 22 frontal battlefields in China during the Anti-Japanese War, the total number of Chinese and Japanese soldiers participating in the Battle of Songhu reached nearly one million. In more than two months, China has successively deployed ground troops, including 78 divisions, 7 independent brigades, 3 temporary brigades, the Tax Police Corps of the Ministry of Finance, the Central Military Academy Teaching Corps, 7 artillery regiments, and 1 gendarmerie regiment. , as well as 4 regiments, the Shanghai Municipal Security Corps and the Shanghai Police Corps Jiangsu Provincial Security Corps, with a total strength of more than 750,000. There are also 8 groups including the 2nd to 9th Group of the Air Force and 1 temporary group, which mobilized almost 1/3 of all the forces in the country at that time. As the Japanese army continues to increase its troops, the total number of participating troops has reached about 250,000, including 9 divisions and 2 detachments of the Army *** (equivalent to 1 brigade), as well as the Fifth Army from North China. The Kunisaki detachment detached from the division, as well as the Third and Fourth Fleets of the Navy. The scale of its mobilization is also unprecedented.
“We consume one division a day!” said Lao Shenghuan, who participated in the Battle of Songhu. “Our equipment is not as good as theirs. Our air force has 250 aircraft, while the other side has more than 3,000 aircraft. In Huangpu, Shanghai The Japanese army has 4 aircraft carriers on the river and the Yangtze River estuary, and more than 100 warships on the Huangpu River and Yangtze River. How can we fight with 250 aircraft against more than 3,000 aircraft? The brigade commander was killed in the battle. Apart from the division commander, only the brigade commander was left. One brigade managed two regiments, and the division commanders had to go to the front to supervise the battle. Later, they all died... Think about it, how big our sacrifice was..." Back then Yi Jin and Lao Shenghuan, the officers at the Battle of Songhu, were both octogenarians. Looking back on the past, the two old men burst into tears.
Sun Yuanliang, commander of the 88th Division and later promoted to commander of the 72nd Army, later recalled that their division had about 15,000 people, and in the end, less than 1/3 remained. "Our troops are put into the battlefield one division after another every day. Some of them are half dead in less than three hours, and some are dead in five hours. This battlefield is like a melting pot. It melts when filled in. "This is what Feng Yuxiang, the former commander of the Third War Zone, said.
The war was actually a comparison of the overall strength of the two countries. He Pinru, the deputy company commander of the 26th Division who participated in the war, recalled after the war that in their division at that time, an infantry company only had 3 machine guns and more than 50 Rifles were made in Hanyang, and the guns were often incomplete. Some even lacked rifle threads, and were even tied with hemp rope to prevent the bolts from falling off. It’s not just equipment we lack. Lao Shenghuan later recalled a small detail: burying pots to make rice. "The marching pots were used to cook, and the sky was filled with fireworks. This was equivalent to telling the enemy, 'I am here, you come here.' Many of our troops, It collapsed without meeting the enemy, and was blown up by Japanese artillery and aircraft."
On the Songhu battlefield on the plains along the Yangtze River, there were almost no natural barriers to defend. The Chinese troops who rushed in from all over the country could hardly build decent fortifications and relied solely on their own flesh and blood. In this way, entire companies and entire battalions often died in battle, but the morale of the follow-up troops never weakened and they still moved forward indomitably.
Take the 98th Division, the most elite in the Chinese army, as an example. In just 18 days of combat, it suffered 4,960 casualties, accounting for almost 62% of the division’s strength. Among them, only officers below the battalion level were killed. There were about 200 people. The 8th Division, with Tao Zhiyue as its commander, was not a direct line unit of the central government. When it entered the Songhu front line, its equipment was still mainly Hanyang-made rifles in the 1920s, and the entire division had no heavy weapons at all. However, in the Songhu battlefield, no matter the central or local troops, there was no shirk in the factional struggle, and they all held the duty of defending the territory to the death. The 8th Division has been involved in the war for nearly three weeks, and the number of combat personnel in the entire division has been reduced from more than 8,000 at the time of the war to 700! At the Yunzaobang battlefield, where the war was the fiercest, the 467th Regiment of the 78th Division met the Japanese troops crossing the river. One company was all killed within 10 minutes!
During the war, dozens of major generals and even lieutenant generals were killed, and even senior Chinese generals committed suicide because they lost their positions. After the war, He Yingqin recorded in his memories that during the Battle of Songhu, "our army consumed 85 divisions and suffered more than 333,500 casualties."
"When the war first started, international people generally believed that China would never be able to resist Japan's force, and that the war of resistance was simply crazy." Cao Juren once wrote about the international community's views on the Battle of Songhu at that time. But the Chinese military has won the respect of the international community precisely through such bloody battles.
When U.S. Marine Corps Captain Evans Carlson arrived in Shanghai as President Roosevelt's special envoy in August 1937, it was under heavy artillery fire. A month later, he wrote in a letter to President Roosevelt: "I can hardly believe that the Chinese people are working together so well at such a critical moment. In my nearly ten years of observation in China, I have never seen Chinese people like this. Today we are united and fighting for the cause of communism."