From September to November, for more than two months, the Han army gradually eroded Cao Cao's territory in Hebei and the Huaihe River.

The main force of Cao's army in the local area was annihilated and severely damaged. The large area of ​​empty land left after expelling was gradually eliminated and a new rule was established.

If you want to say that this kind of rule is completely stable, it is impossible. After all, this is the first time that Liu Bei's court has entered the imperial court in many places, and it has no mass base before.

Therefore, a large number of troops are still involved in the local area. It will take at least several months to suppress bandits, search for defeated soldiers, and re-establish public security... The worst-case counties and counties will be involved for a year or two.

Of course, the number of troops required during the post-war transition maintenance period will definitely decline significantly compared to the battle period.

For example, when we were besieging Xiahou Yuan before, the battlefield in Hebei required 100,000 Han troops, and it would be enough to temporarily leave 60,000 to 70,000 people to maintain it after the war.

Those fast-mobile cavalry units can be transferred to other battlefields in a short time, and the infantry will be left to suppress bandits.

The situation in Huainan is similar. After Shouchun was opened, a considerable number of Li Su's troops could go north along the Huaihe River and Yingchuan, Honggou, or raid northern Xuzhou along the Si River and restrain Cao's army.

In this way, as of December, the Han army on the front of the Yanyu battlefield will usher in a new peak in scale.

After the stalemate of the attacks in the past six months, the number of the direct troops under Liu Bei's command that had personally led the army to fight had dropped to 160,000 to 170,000 - 200,000 when they went to fight, which was 300,000 to 40,000 in comparison.

Of course, this does not mean that the 30,000 to 40,000 people died, and only 10,000 or 20,000 people died of illness in battle, and the rest are non-permanent losses such as injuries and illnesses.

The army has been in stalemate for so long and is still crowded. Small-scale epidemics are bound to be inevitable. No matter how sanitary conditions are, it is normal to lose 20,000 people.

However, as at least 30,000 fast-mobile cavalry troops on the Hebei battlefield moved south, and with the more than 20,000 people left by Guan Yu to Que Yi before, they were near Chenliu, so at least 50,000 combat troops would come from the northern line to support Liu Bei.

Li Su from the Huai River would leave about 40,000 to 50,000 people to continue to clear Huainan and maintain rule. At least until the end of the spring plowing next year, he would not be able to get out of here. He would also have to go to Sishui to restrain Cao's army in northern Xuzhou and share the defense attention of Cao's army.

By doing this, Li Su only pulled out 40,000 people to go north along Yingchuan and support the central main force from the southern wing to use it for future battles against the remaining Qiao County and Chen County in Yuzhou.

After the reinforcements on the north and south wings were strengthened, Liu Bei could obtain more than 80,000 people, plus he still has combat effectiveness, and the total frontal force reached 260,000.

This number has been counted as a temporary non-combat reduction, so it is all new forces that can go to the battlefield.

As for military generals, Hebei can get the support of Guan Yu and Ma Chao, while Tuo Yi was in Chenliu from the beginning, while Zhang Fei and Xu Huang were left in Hebei to clear and maintain the place.

Strictly speaking, Zhang Fei is not very suitable for stabilizing local areas and suppressing bandits, but Liu Bei's arrangements are taken into account that Zhang Fei is a native of Youzhou and is familiar with the situation in Jizhou.

Moreover, Zhang Fei respected the scholars and officials more and could better win over the allegiance of the Jizhou tribe after Cao Cao's purge.

Finally, considering that Zhang Fei was injured in the decisive battle with Xiahou Yuan, although he was shot and had his ears broken and his face cut, these injuries were not very serious, but it was not good to devote himself to continuous mobile warfare two months after the war, so let the generals who were completely uninjured take the front line.

As for Zhao Yun, he could have been transferred to the Henan War Zone, but Zhao Yun had been fighting south along Bohai County on the coast of the Bohai Sea. His defense zone was far away from the front line of Yuzhou and his turnover was slow.

So if you have to come to Yanyu in front, it will theoretically be a month later than other troops.

After comprehensive consideration, Liu Bei did not let Zhao Yun come to the front, but stayed in the newly restored Pingyuan County.

Once there is a new breakthrough in the next stage of the Henan battlefield, such as breaking into the hinterland of Dongjun, defeating Cao Cao's main force, and threatening Puyang and Juancheng. At that time, Zhao Yun can take advantage of the empty defense of Cao's army on the other side of Pingyuan County, directly crossing the Yellow River from Pingyuan to attack Cao Cao's main force.

In other words, Zhao Yun was assigned a role who entered the field from the flank to reap the situation after opening up the situation.

Because the troops supported by the Hebei battlefield were mainly cavalry (there were 30,000 cavalry among the 50,000 people, and the 20,000 of Que Yi was infantry), the final composition of Guan Yu, Zhao Yun and Ma Chao led the troops was very in line with the actual needs.

Guan Yu led the 20,000 infantrymen, Zhao Yun and Ma Chao were the only ones who ruled the 30,000 cavalry, and each showed its strengths.

Guan Yu and Ma Chao and other civil servants, such as Xu Shu and Deng Zhi, would also support the frontal battlefield together. Zhang Fei's military officers Pang Tong and others would stay in Jizhou to temporarily deal with internal affairs.

On the other hand, Li Sujun, who supported the support from the Huaihe River Basin to the Yingchuan Basin, mainly led military generals in Ganning, while civil servants and strategists were basically not mobilized.

Because Li Su has few talents who can stand on his own along the way, he also has to deal with the capriciousness of Sun Quan, Zhu Zhi, and Li Su who have just joined the service for a while are worried and left only the generals to guard the situation.

Li Su himself will be in charge of Shouchun for a period of time, initially complete the reconstruction of post-war order, and control Sun Quan, Zhu Zhi and Lu Fan.

Zhuge Liang was sent to the East Road to supervise Zhou Tai to threaten Pengcheng and Langya along the Sishui River.

Zhou Tai's journey was originally restrictive, but it doesn't matter whether there are top strategists or not.

But Liu Bei and Li Su also hope to give Zhuge Liang an extra gift so that he could return home in glory and personally recover his hometown Langya, so that such an arrangement was made.

In the future, after the victory or defeat is decided on the front battlefield, Zhuge Liang can complete the harvesting of the enemy-occupied areas in northern Xuzhou.

...

Some people may wonder: Since the two or three months from late autumn to early winter, Liu Bei's army has been continuously expanding its strength and territory, freeing up hands to dispatch more combat troops to enrich the central army.

Then why didn’t Cao Cao take advantage of this period to turn Liu Bei into an offensive?

Cao Cao had already made up his mind and knew that there was no future for him to stick to each other, so he could only gamble and make a desperate move.

If you fight back when Liu Bei only had 170,000 troops, you would wait for two or three months and spend more time until Liu Bei's total strength rebounded to 260,000, you would be more confident?

Of course, this has been thought of by the IQs of Cao Cao, Guo Jia and Xun Yu.

Therefore, Cao Cao didn't do that, not because he didn't want to, but because he really couldn't do it.

Cao Cao's own troops took time to harvest, transport, process and transfer autumn grains.

The young men who just got brought up from the newly occupied area have been busy with these tasks throughout October, and it is completely impossible to have time for military training.

At least November after, hundreds of thousands of civilians had just begun simple training. If the time was too tight, they could only practice arrays, discipline, advance with guns, or use simple crossbows.

Moreover, the so-called crossbow training basically allows you to practice crossbows, which can be quickly accomplished.

The training time of the bow takes a long time, and it takes several months to get started. The arm strength may not necessarily pull a strong bow a few times, and it takes several years to become a relatively elite archer.

However, the military production of Cao Cao's camp was also in trouble. Although it was difficult to train archers, it was easier to manufacture weapons. Crossbows required more tricks and were very slow to produce.

Even without considering the material gap of the beef tendon crossbow strings, the processing capacity of wood and metal mechanisms alone, with the industrial production capacity of Cao Cao's remaining two and a half states, he only produced more than 20,000 shoddy crossbow wooden frames throughout the winter.

The huge gap in beef tendons has resulted in less than one-fifth of these crossbows that can produce qualified strings, while the remaining four-fifths can only be used to replace animal tendons with animal tendons as strings.

Moreover, these leathers cannot be guaranteed to be made of cowhide. Later, even pig skins with poor elasticity were used to fill the gap.

Leather was used to build inferior crossbows for new soldiers. During the expansion of military equipment in this winter, the manufacturing of leather armor was completely abandoned, so that so many new troops were expanded, but no supply of soldiers' armor was added at all.

At most, the newly expanded officers above the garrison were assigned to the army. As for the commander and ordinary soldiers, all the officers were not armed, or "cloth armor".

There is no leather armor, let alone the expansion of iron armor. How come there is so much steel waste. All the steel is used to build spear tips or key mechanisms for crossbows for recruits.

There are also a small amount of steel that has been formed into clusters of arrows, but the proportion is also very low. Fortunately, the civilian "pencil sharpener" wooden pole lathes are also slightly popular in the Kanto region. The production capacity of the wooden gun rod and arrow shaft of the Caojun chariot is sufficient to produce millions of wooden arrows without metal arrows.

The tips of these wooden arrows are like newly sharpened pencils, and then shot out with inferior crossbows with leather strings rather than tendon strings. The amount of lethality they have is completely left to fate.

Because this kind of crossbow can only be produced urgently for 20,000 to 30,000, many new crossbowmen in the Cao army were asked to be equipped with a short iron-headed spear first and stand behind the crossbowmen comrades in the front row when they went to the battlefield.

Once the front row of crossbowmen is shot to death by the opponent and there is a gap, the temporary crossbowmen behind him will be pushed up and pick up the dead crossbowmen in the first row to continue outputting.

If the front row crossbowmen were charged by the enemy in close combat and killed closely, the "prepared crossbowmen" in the back row would not have a chance to output remotely, so they would fight with the short spear and wooden shield.

There is no way, who made Cao Cao's demand for strengthening his men and expanding his army so urgently, so he could only do this to shoddy work.

At the beginning of this year, when Cao Cao had just faced Liu Bei, the total strength of Cao's army was still 500,000.

Later, the front of the Yuzhou battlefield ended in a year, with a loss of at least 50,000 yuan.

More than half of the Cao army on the battlefield in Jizhou were retreated to the south bank of the Yellow River under the command of Cheng Yu and Zhang He. Only half of the troops represented by Xiahou Yuan were annihilated. Therefore, Cao Cao in Hebei "lost his territory and lost relatively little of his living forces", and finally lost more than 40,000 troops.

Li Dian and Cao Zhen successfully retreated on the battlefield in Huainan. These two troops escaped, Cao Ren and Cao Xiu were completely wiped out, and Yuan Shu's old subordinates represented by Liu Xun surrendered. Therefore, the total loss in Huainan was more than 50,000.

In total, Cao Cao was annihilated in one year.

Therefore, before the re-enhancing of the army in late autumn, Cao Cao's regular army's strength dropped from 500,000 at the beginning of the year to 350,000.

However, this latest winter military expansion is really exaggerated, and almost all young and middle-aged men who have been brought from Hebei to Henan have been exaggerated.

After the expansion of the army, the total number of Cao's army was far greater than the 500,000 at the beginning of the year, but the quality also plummeted.
Chapter completed!