If you carefully analyze Hao Bainian's past battles, you will find that the battles commanded by Hao Bainian, unless they are in extreme circumstances, are the type where the risks are not high, but they are not the type to be fought steadily.
He prefers to control risks within a certain range, and then strive for as big a result as possible. He also likes and is better at commanding troops to carry out large-scale maneuvers, and then surround or force the enemy to engage in a decisive battle with him.
The most typical example is when he marched south to Guangxi, he led his troops to bypass Liuzhou, but attacked Wei Yan's eight thousand army first.
As for the critical battles, to be honest, Hao Bainian was not good at it. Whether it was the critical battles in Wuzhou or Guangzhou, they were not actually commanded by Hao Bainian, but by the staff of the Operations Department in the Privy Council.
In fact, not being good at critical battles is not a fault of Hao Bainian alone, but a common fault of the Tang Army. It cannot even be said to be a fault of the Tang Army, but a type of combat that all armies these days are not good at.
Whenever they have a choice, any general, whether ancient or modern, will try their best to avoid tough battles.
But sometimes, tough battles are necessary.
Take Yizhang for example. Although a group of staff members believed that Yizhang could be bypassed, Hao Bainian himself did not think so.
Yizhang served as the bridgehead for the Huguang Ming Army to defend against the Tang Dynasty King's Division. With Yizhang City as the core and supplemented by Chenzhou City, a full 50,000 troops were deployed, forming a fairly complete defense line that could support each other.
Bypassing Yizhang, will the enemy army in Yizhang sit back and watch our army pass by? It will definitely affect our logistics supply line in the first stage!
And judging from the distance, if even Yizhang had to go around it, then the distance to attack Hengzhou would be too far.
Therefore, the critical battle in Yizhang must be carried out. As for Chenzhou, we can leave it alone. However, if the enemy troops from the direction of Chenzhou dare to come to rescue, Hao Bainian does not mind fighting a battle of encirclement and reinforcement.
After carefully calculating the troops on hand, Hao Bainian finally made his decision. He would ignore Chenzhou and Hengzhou for now and finish Yizhang first.
At least in this way, you can build a safe logistics supply line of at least a hundred miles for your own side!
However, it is not easy to defeat Yizhang. The Ming army has not been idle in the past six months. Before the Tang Dynasty Wangshi captured Shaozhou Prefecture, they had already built a defense line with Yizhang as the core. According to intelligence facts, the Ming army
In Yizhang alone, at least hundreds of artillery pieces were deployed. Although most of the artillery pieces were small-caliber artillery pieces, there were also many general cannons and Franco machine guns.
If you attack rashly, you will most likely be attacked by intensive firepower from the city walls!
Hao Bainian did not want to suffer too much damage under Yizhang City, so before attacking Yizhang, he must first draw out some of Yizhang's enemy troops and destroy them.
After thinking for a long time and discussing detailed tactics with a group of staff officers, Hao Bainian finally made tactical arrangements: the units of the 1st Infantry Division withdrew from the outer front of Yizhang and immediately made a gesture of rapidly advancing northward.
At the same time, the temporary fourth regiment will continue to march towards Chenzhou according to the original plan, but the 1st Infantry Division will also bypass Chenzhou.
The above-mentioned combat plan is similar to the previous second plan, which bypasses Yizhang and Chenzhou.
But the difference is that when Hao Bainian ordered the main force of the 1st Infantry Division to move north again, he transferred the 1st Infantry Regiment, two light artillery teams and the 1st Cavalry Battalion to form a temporary mixed force, sneaked around Yizhang, and once again
Return to Yizhang.
What is the purpose? The purpose is to mobilize the main force of the 1st Infantry Division and the temporary 4th Infantry Regiment to make the Ming army think that it will bypass Yizhang and Chenzhou.
But Hao Bainian's real goal is to have the First Infantry Regiment serve as the core mixed force to kill a carbine. As long as Yizhang's Ming army dares to come out to cut off its own supply line, the First Infantry Regiment will quickly pounce on it and strive to annihilate it in the wild.
These Yizhang Ming troops who dared to leave the city.
There are many concerns, the biggest of which is whether the temporary fourth regiment can successfully contain the enemies of Chenzhou, because the 1st Infantry Division mainly needs to continue to move north and make a gesture of attacking Hengzhou, and the main force cannot turn around.
After all, the Ming Army is not the same. They will continue to send out reconnaissance cavalry to observe the movements of their main force. The transfer of tens of thousands of people cannot be easily concealed.
If the Chenzhou enemy were allowed to break through the interception of the temporary fourth regiment, the 1st Infantry Division would be too late to return reinforcements, and the 1st Infantry Regiment might be in danger.
As for the enemy seeing through Hao Bainian's plan and being unable to survive, that doesn't matter. The worst that Hao Bainian can do is turn the lie into the truth and continue northward to Hengzhou with the main force of the First Infantry Division. Anyway, his goal is not to conquer.
One city at a time, his purpose was to conquer the entire southern Huguang. If the Ming army did not take the initiative to attack, the logistics line could be guaranteed. In this way, although the main force of the 1st Infantry Division going north was smaller, it was not impossible to fight.
And Hao Bainian didn't think that the Ming army would remain indifferent after seeing through it. They would definitely mobilize accordingly, and once they mobilized, they would have a chance.
The worst case scenario is not to attack Hengzhou, or even Yizhang, but to be flexible and annihilate one or two Ming troops first.
The plan proposed by Hao Bainian actually did not have a specific goal of attacking that city. A direct attack on Hengzhou was just a cover. Even if he really attacked Hengzhou, it was still a cover. Chenzhou and Yizhang were also not his real purpose. His real goal was to attack Hengzhou.
There is only one purpose, and that is to annihilate the main force of the Ming Army.
As long as the main force of the Ming army is defeated, Yizhang, Chenzhou and even Hengzhou will be in the pocket!
This can be regarded as the main fighting method in the Tang Army. Although the ultimate goal is to conquer a certain city, the process of the battle is mainly to annihilate the enemy's effective forces, and there is no rush to attack a specific city.
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Even in Wuzhou and Guangzhou before, the Tang army did not rush to attack. Instead, they first cleared the periphery, then besieged the enemy for a long time, and then made sufficient preparations before launching a strong attack.
As the commander of the First Army and the commander of the First Infantry Division, Hao Bainian's orders were naturally implemented thoroughly. Soon, on the third day after launching a full-line offensive, the First Infantry Division and the temporary 1st Infantry Division were
The Fourth Regiment began to mobilize according to relevant plans.
The first to move was the temporary fourth regiment, which had more than 3,000 people. Although the temporary fourth regiment only had one infantry battalion, the other four were reserve battalions, and their forces were all adapted from the garrison.
The quality is a little worse, but the number of people seems to be quite large, and all of them are wearing regular army uniforms with red tops and bottoms. In the eyes of the Ming army, these are all fake Tang Dynasty thieves.
The real thieves of the Pseudo-Tang Dynasty are not easy to fight. In the eyes of many Ming army generals, if there are 10,000 fake thieves of the Pseudo-Tang Dynasty thief army, then our own strength is also 10,000 or slightly more, then we can fight, and it is a head-on battle.
In a battle, the outcome would be 50-50, so if they faced the former garrison, they would still have the courage to fight.
But if you encounter a real thief from the fake Tang Dynasty, you will need at least twice or even three times more troops. A one-on-one duel is absolutely not feasible!
There was no way, they were frightened by the regular troops in the Tang Dynasty army, which made many Ming army generals feel inexplicably scared when they heard the words "real thieves of the fake Tang Dynasty".
Although they are not as fearful of the enemy as tigers, they do not have a two or three times superiority in troops at hand, and they will not take the initiative to go out of the city to fight if they kill these Ming army generals.
When the frontline investigation found that more than 3,000 fake Tang real thieves had arrived, the nearly 10,000 Ming troops who had just come out of Chenzhou and were preparing to support Yizhang consciously stopped. Of course, they did not retreat to the city en masse.
, after all, those 3,000 puppet Tang traitor troops just came here, and this hasn’t happened yet.
But not long after, they learned from the report of the reconnaissance cavalry that the tens of thousands of puppet Tang rebel troops besieging Yizhang bypassed Yizhang and went directly north. They all took a breath of cold air. Fortunately, there was no
Keep going south, otherwise you will run into the main force of the Puppet Tang thief army, which is more than 10,000 people. With less than 10,000 troops of your own, you will be annihilated if you run into them!
The puppet Tang thief army wants to encircle the place and bring reinforcements!
This is their unified judgment, because the Tang rebel army has done this kind of thing many times, and the Ming army has also suffered many losses. The most obvious example is the Battle of Jingzhou.
At that time, when tens of thousands of puppet Tang rebels besieged Jingzhou, the Ming army from Xingquan Prefecture returned to aid Jingzhou. As a result, more than 15,000 reinforcements returned and tens of thousands of Ming troops came out from Jingzhou City to assist.
They were defeated one after another, which totaled more than 25,000 troops. They were completely wiped out in a few days!
Yes, the Ming army still has not figured out how many people the Fourth Army had when they attacked Jingzhou, especially after the Fourth Army captured many prisoners and temporarily incorporated them into the garrison.
At that time, the number of troops in Jingzhou had reached more than 15,000, but in fact, many of the troops could not fight. The only ones that could fight were an infantry regiment plus some regular auxiliary troops of about 5,000.
The current generals of the Ming Army have a natural fear of the puppet Tang rebel army encircling the point to fight for reinforcements. When they saw that the puppet Tang rebel army spared Yizhang and did not fight, but instead wanted to go north, their first reaction was
This is a trap by the puppet Tang rebels. They want to surround the area for reinforcements and attack their own reinforcements that came out of Chenzhou.
Therefore, the Ming army general who led the team discussed with several other subordinates, and then decided to return to Chenzhou to see the situation.
If you continue to stay outside, you will easily be entangled by the main force of the puppet Tang rebel army, and you will be unable to leave even if you want to.
The reinforcements from Chenzhou immediately withdrew back to Chenzhou, but what surprised them even more was that they later discovered that these puppet Tang rebels were still continuing to move north!
Looking at this posture, they are heading towards Hengzhou. For a while, some Ming army generals were worried about the safety of Hengzhou, while some Ming army generals were ecstatic!