Before the advent of the era of instant communication, the success or failure of a war often depended on the use of time differences. Ancient Chinese military commanders put forward the concept of "soldiers are more valuable and speed is faster", which was a manifestation of their deep understanding of this principle of war. And now that the "Horqin Defense Battle" has started, the time difference will also come into play.
As long as you open the map, you will find that there is an obvious protrusion on the border between Ming and Mongolia at this moment, which is Daning City. Daning City is an isolated military fortress city of the Ming Dynasty outside the Great Wall. It is three hundred miles (150 kilometers) away from Xifengkou, where Cao Yan left the customs, and there is nothing around it that can " The stronghold of "each other's horns".
Although there are several strongholds from Xifengkou to Daning, those strongholds are not even considered "permanent fortifications" - Qingcheng, where the Battle of Qingcheng broke out, is the stronghold, and there is only one Wubao here. Adding three piers, the total garrison only has about 200 people. Rather than being a support point for the war, it is better to admit frankly that they only serve as early warning and transmitting messages.
At the same time, the distance between Daning City and Chahanhot is about 500 miles. Since this road is basically grassland, it only takes a few days for Tumen to return to Chahanhot. However, how long would it take for the news that Tumen left Daning City and returned to Chahanhot to reach Liaodong?
You might as well take a look at the route of delivering the message: first from Daning via Xifengkou to Zunhua in the pass, because that is where the general soldiers of Jizhen and the guarding eunuchs are stationed. Then it is divided into two routes from Zunhua, and one route is sent back to the capital. The other one was sent to Liaodong.
Those going to the capital don't need to worry about it, just talk about the way to Liaodong. First, send from Zunhua to Shanhaiguan via Yongping Prefecture. After passing Shanhaiguan, take the Liaoxi Corridor and enter the Liaodong Central Hub. Generally speaking, of course, it is first given to the Liaodong General Military Officer stationed in Guangning, Liaoxi Province, and then sent to Liaoyang via Niuzhuang (located near Dongchang Fort, a key area of the Liaonan Battle mentioned earlier in this book).
Because of such detours, just sending the news from Daning to Liaoyang would have covered a distance of more than 1,600 miles. But here comes the problem. Now we need to inform Xiao Ruxun, who has already sent troops to Horqin, of the news about Daning City. This will take several hundred more miles, and Xiao Ruxun's troops are still on the move. I'm afraid they can find their specific location. It will take some more time.
In this way, it would take at least twenty days to deliver the news that "Tumen has returned east from Daning" to Xiao Ruxun. As long as there is a slight accident, it would probably be a month.
Looking back at the Chahan army, it only takes a few days for Tumen to return from Daning to Chahanhot. If you consider it a little slower, ten days is really plenty of time, right? So how far is it and how long does it take to get from Chahanhot to Horqin?
The answer is between three hundred and six hundred miles, depending on the location of their opponents. Calculating six hundred miles, and continuing to calculate based on the Tumen army's labor force, it will definitely not take more than fifteen days to get there.
This means that in twenty-five days at the latest, the Tumen army will be able to return to the Horqin battlefield - and at this time Xiao Ruxun will not receive news of Tumen's return eastward at all.
As a general born in Liaodong, Cao Yu of course has always been concerned about the situation related to Liaodong. This is human nature, so he also thought about this issue. However, as the saying goes, a good woman cannot make a meal without rice. Although Cao Yun was worried about this situation, he was limited to the means of information transmission and could only sit on the candle. There was no solution at all.
It wasn't until he went to Gao Jiang to learn about the details of the Battle of Qingcheng that he learned from Gao Jiangkou that Jinghua had a carrier pigeon system. Although the coverage was not comprehensive, it happened that Daning City had a carrier pigeon line leading to Fuxin City.
Fuxin is one of the two newly built cities proposed by Gao Pragmatic last time (the other is Dandong near North Korea). It is located in the northwest of the Liaohe Hetao area recovered after the Battle of Southern Liaoning, and is almost half of the protrusion.
However, the strategic situation of the protruding part of Fuxin is much better than that of Daning, because the new border wall in Liaodong has been roughly built. Although it is not fully connected, there are already more than a dozen bastions surrounding Fuxin City. From the perspective of protecting Fuxin City itself, it can almost be said that although it is not the Great Wall, it is not inferior to the Great Wall.
Why did Jinghua build a dedicated pigeon station in Fuxin? The answer is simple: Fuxin has a mine, so Jinghua is planning to buy land here and demonstrate the costs and benefits of mining. It needs better information transmission capabilities.
The main reason why Gao Pragmatic proposed building a new city in Fuxin was that Fuxin had mines. According to the information provided by Liu Xin, the coal reserves in this area are more than 750 million tons; the peat resource reserves are more than 1 million tons; although the gold mines are widely distributed, large and medium-sized deposits are concentrated, the gold is of good quality, and the metal content is 17 tons. and above; iron ore reserves are above 65 million tons.
In addition, the Fuxin area is also extremely rich in non-metallic mineral resources, including silica sand, bentonite, purple clay, marble, limestone, granite, fluorite, and medical stone. Unfortunately, Liu Xin said she could not remember the specifics. The amount is huge, in her words, "it must be quite a lot anyway."
In this era, the use of stone materials basically must be obtained from nearby materials, otherwise the cost is not cost-effective. Therefore, Gao is pragmatic and has no plans to develop any stone materials in Fuxin. However, coal, iron and gold mines are naturally not polite, so Jinghua Mining has early The land is set up here to look for minerals.
Jinghua is famous for mining all over the world. I won’t go into details about mining for the time being. I will only talk about this carrier pigeon station. The pigeon station was originally a single-line back-and-forth communication, that is, a pigeon flew from a certain place to deliver a message, and generally did not stay for more than one night before returning to the "originating point", so in most cases it was used to receive messages. If you want to "reply", you must either reply immediately and send it back with the pigeon, or send another pigeon to fly again.
Of course, this is not a problem in an emergency, and Gao Jiang said something that made Cao Yan almost pop his eyes out in shock: it only takes more than an hour for a carrier pigeon to fly from Daning to Fuxin.
After questioning, Cao Yu found out that since the homing pigeons were flying, they could arrive in a straight line regardless of terrain problems. Since the straight-line distance between Daning and Fuxin is only 400 miles, and the trained homing pigeons are very fast, they can fly 400 miles in an hour if there are no big obstacles in the direction and strength of the wind.
[Note: The flying speed of general homing pigeons is 70-110 kilometers per hour, and the flying speed of better homing pigeons can reach 90-150 kilometers per hour. Some modern tests show that the fastest flying pigeon can fly at a speed of 177 kilometers per hour. Therefore, what Gao Jiang said here is actually quite conservative. ]
When Cao Yu heard this, he wanted to agree at that time, but Gao Jiang raised another question: Fuxin only had a carrier pigeon station, but no cavalry stationed there, and Xiao Ruxun's troops were still outside the pass. The carrier pigeons would only find fixed "liaison offices". Obviously no carrier pigeons could find them, so they could only send riders to deliver the letters door-to-door, so things got stuck here.
However, Cao Yun said that this was not a problem at all, because although the Fuxin guerrillas were located in western Liaoning and were under the direct control of Li Rusong, the commander-in-chief of Liaodong, the current Fuxin guerrilla general was commanded by him, General Cao - His younger brother Cao Jian.
Since the Cao brothers embraced Gao Pangshi, they have really embarked on a prosperous road. The elder brother Cao Yu has achieved his wish and climbed to the peak of the military generals' career as a general officer. The commander of the Southern District Guards climbed to the position of real power and became a guerrilla.
Although Fuxin City is currently just a new immigrant city with a small population, it is not only a frontline location, but was also proposed to be built by Gao Pragmatic, the Minister of the "Big Household Department" who controls the world's financial power. What does high pragmatic support mean? This means that Fuxin has strong support from the central government, with a steady stream of immigrants from the disaster area, continuous financial investment, and a speed of construction and development that makes many old cities drool.
In addition, Jinghua has already explored mineral deposits on a large scale here. Based on past experience, it is likely that factories and mines will be built here in the future. It is conceivable that in three to five years at most, Fuxin will be a pearl in Liaodong, and a general here will have a bright future.
It was obvious how Cao Jian would react when his brother's order was sent through the carrier pigeon station in Jinghua. He would definitely send the most elite Ye Bushou under his command to pass the news to Xiao Ruxun as quickly as possible.
Since Cao Zongrong said this, Gao Jiang naturally agreed. Cao Yan didn't carry his personal seal with him, so he wrote back to the temporary office. Half an hour later, two identical, brief letters were sent to Gao Jiang. Gao Jiang personally supervised the release of the two carrier pigeons at the carrier pigeon station.
Here, the Ming army in Daning City urgently contacted Xiao Ruxun, but over there, Xiao Ruxun was still playing hide-and-seek with Abadai Saiyin Khan... No, it should be said that they were engaged in a chase.
Actually, this chase battle was not what Xiao Ruxun wanted to fight. According to his intention, since Tumen did not come and the Horqin tribe had joined up with his Ming-Manchu coalition forces, all he had to do was withdraw directly outside Kaiyuan. When the time comes, the Ming army returns to Kaiyuan to station, and the three Manchu tribes can stay outside the border wall and station with Horqin, or return to their own territory, that's up to them.
In his opinion, it is not cost-effective for the Ming army to wander outside the pass all the time, because although the Ming army also uses cavalry, the cavalry of the Ming army will not run away with cattle and sheep, and their "combat self-sustainability" is not comparable to that of Horqin. , even compared to Manchuria III, it is slightly inferior.
After all, people were not well fed and could just make do with enough to eat. However, due to the Ming Army's practical reform, the dietary standards of the Liaodong frontier troops had been raised twice in more than ten years. The current regulations are that every meal must be oily, and even if there is no meat, there must be fish. Although the quantity is not large, it still increases the logistical pressure.
Therefore, Xiao Ruxun hopes that the Ming army will withdraw into the pass as soon as possible. The Horqin tribe and the Manchu tribe will naturally not be brought into the border wall, but the Kaiyuan border wall is not far from the original. If the Horqin tribe is stationed within the northwest border wall of Kaiyuan In addition, once the police are present, the Ming army can rush to support within a day.
As for the three tribes of Manchuria, Ye He and Hada are the so-called "North Pass" and "Nang Pass". The north and south are all aimed at Kaiyuan. Naturally, they are very close to Yuan. Even if they return to their own territory, they have to rescue Horqin. It will not take more than two days. The Jianzhou Right Guards were further away, but the number of troops they sent was very small. In Xiao Ruxun's eyes, the symbolic significance was greater than the practical significance. It didn't matter whether they were in time or not.
Is two days enough time for rescue? It should be enough, because the Horqin tribe itself is also a Mongolian nomad. During the war, the detection scope of the sentry horses will definitely be increased, and the two-day warning time should be able to be obtained.
However, Horqin's Ministry politely expressed disapproval of this idea. There are two reasons: First, the relationship between the Inner Khalkha tribe (Horqin belongs to the Inner Khalkha tribe) and the Outer Khalkha tribe was not very good. The historical reasons for this are rather complicated and there is no need to elaborate further here. In short, although both sides have the name "Khalkha", they are definitely not a family that loves each other. It's more like falling in love and killing each other.
Secondly, this time Abadai Saiyin Khan had just been frightened by Tumen's sudden attack on the city and surrendered. He turned around and beat Horqin into disgrace. This made Horqin's Taiji and Baylor (according to different accounts) face-saving. I couldn't stand it anymore, and I was very angry. I wanted to save my reputation and take revenge.
On this basis, Horqin's three Taijiyi combined and believed that the current strength of the coalition forces has actually formed a crushing trend against Abadai Saiyin Khan, and the total strength has been between two and three times. In such an advantageous situation, naturally we should not "fear the enemy and avoid fighting" and retreat to Kaiyuan as a little girl. Instead, we should go to Abadai Saiyin Khan for a decisive battle with high spirits. Even if we don't say annihilate the opponent completely, we must at least beat him so that he can escape back to Helin and dare not look eastward for the rest of his life.
The opinions of the Horqin tribe were also supported by the Yehe tribe. Although the Yehe and Beile spoke very politely and humbly, their meaning was still very clear: they also felt that Abadai Saiyin Khan should be beaten painfully and let He should go back to Mobei as soon as possible and stop interfering in Monan's affairs.
In fact, the attitude of the two of them is not unreasonable. It can even be said to be very matter-of-fact. After all, in the past, the Tumen were rarely able to gather the people from the Outer Khalkha tribe. If this opening becomes a habit, then every time the Tumen are dispatched Even having 20,000 more troops would have a considerable impact on the situation.
Meng Gebulu of the Hada Department was not very active this time - well, he could not be said to be active before he sent troops to rescue Horqin. In fact, what he did was to give face to Daming's father, and even to a certain extent, to give Gao Pragmatic face. . Now that we have the chance to run away, wouldn't it be nice to go home and prepare for the winter? Why waste time and things by wandering around Horqin? Therefore, Menggebulu agreed that the Ming army should withdraw to Kaiyuan.
Wu Erkun of Jianzhou Right Guard said as always, the Ming Dynasty said one thing and I will never say the other. No matter whether General Xiao wants to continue to pursue Abadai Saiyin or withdraw to Kaiyuan, in short, I, Jianzhou Right Guard, will definitely obey the order. Act without any disagreement.
Perhaps Xiao Ruxun has a "big picture view" and thinks that the reason why Gao Situ is fighting this war is to tightly tie up Horqin's tribe. Or maybe Xiao Ruxun feels that he has to give face to Gao Situ's two uncles and has to deal with Ye He. He took his opinions seriously. In short, after some consideration, he finally decided to continue pursuing Abadai Saiyin Khan.
The chase went a bit too far and ended up near Laoniu Mountain in the southern part of Kulun Banner in Inner Mongolia.
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