Changsha, this city where Yang Sichang was personally in charge, gathered 30,000 troops!
Its outcome was already doomed after the entire left army of the New Standard Army was destroyed. Luo Zhixue knew this, Yang Sichang knew this, and even many well-informed gentry and wealthy people in the opposite city knew this.
So when the Chu army's reconnaissance cavalry appeared outside Changsha City, the defenders inside the city began to waver, and some soldiers and even generals began to flee secretly.
As for the wealthy gentry in the city, people had actually begun to flee long before the Chu army. After all, Chu thieves were different from ordinary thieves.
Facing ordinary bandits, a large and solid city is a guarantee of safety, but staying in the countryside is even more dangerous.
But facing the Chu thieves, it was the other way around. Staying in the city was even more dangerous, and they were faced with the impact of war at any time. After all, guns and cannons don't have a good eye.
If you stay in a rural village, as long as you don't resist the tax when the Chu thieves come, you basically don't have to worry too much about safety issues.
Therefore, many wealthy gentry families in Changsha City, those who are thoughtful and qualified, have already begun arranging for their families to withdraw from Changsha, a city destined to become a battlefield.
When the Chu bandit reconnaissance cavalry also arrived in the area outside Changsha City, another group of wealthy gentry who wanted to escape but had been struggling before also ran away.
Faced with the flight of the wealthy gentry in the city, Yang Sichang, who was in charge of the war in the city, was very angry at first and ordered the city gates to be closed, prohibiting the wealthy gentry from fleeing, and called on the wealthy gentry and ordinary people in the city to contribute money and efforts if they had the money. Defend the city together and overcome difficulties.
However, these wealthy gentry who wanted to flee were not ordinary people. Many of them had family members who were officials in the government and had extensive connections.
And among these people who fled, many were actually the family members of mid- to high-level officials in the city.
Although many officials did not want to escape, or were unable to escape, it did not prevent them from sending their families out of Changsha to escape the war.
Yang Sichang seemed to have a high and powerful position, but it was difficult for him to fall out with a large number of wealthy gentry and even a group of subordinates.
Those gentry and subordinates did not foolishly directly oppose openly, but absconded secretly.
In the end, Yang Sichang could only turn a blind eye to this.
With the heavy troops of the Chu thieves suppressing the situation, the morale of the army and the people in the city was completely lost. What could Yang Sichang do?
After all, everyone knows that the city's defenders, who can only fight with only 30,000 men and can only fight with 5,000 soldiers, cannot stop the 40,000 to 50,000 Chu troops outside the city who have hundreds of artillery pieces.
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After Luo Zhixue led the Chu army to Changsha City, they did not rush to attack. Instead, they set up camp and built fortifications to prevent the Ming army from leaving the city for surprise attacks or night attacks.
In the following days, various siege equipment began to be built on the spot, mainly various long ladders for climbing the city wall and shield vehicles to defend against the Ming army's guns and arrows during the advance.
As for other siege equipment, especially large siege equipment, the Chu army, which held hundreds of cannons, said they had no need for it.
When the Chu army sieges a city, they never need any large siege equipment. Just pulling up the cannon is more effective than any other siege equipment.
Artillery plus blasting, coupled with intensive musket fire support, and heavy armored infantry raids, are already the old routine of the Chu army's siege.
As the side that defended the city most of the time, the Ming army also responded tit-for-tat, building more anti-artillery fortifications, and extending the defense line outward from the city wall to build trenches and salient fortresses.
In order to offset the large number of field artillery and mortars in the Chu army.
This kind of tit-for-tat offensive and defensive operations between the two sides had initial signs in the Battle of Wuchang, was relatively mature in the Battle of Linxiang, and has reached its peak in Changsha now.
Changsha under the leadership of Yang Sichang had quite complete artillery defense fortifications at the city head as well as trenches and fortifications outside the city.
At the same time, compared with the Linxiang garrison, the Changsha garrison has another advantage, that is, there are 3,000 new standard right troops in the city.
Although this right army was just a backup plan used by Yang Sichang to cover up the Chu army's spies, it was still organized and trained according to the organization and equipment of the Chu army's main force.
It's just that the quality of the soldiers and the level of equipment are not as good as those of the Zuo Army.
This right army has about a thousand new muskets, six two-and-a-half-pound field guns, and two five-pound field guns.
These thousand muskets and seven artillery pieces are the most advanced and important city defense equipment in the Changsha garrison.
In addition to these advanced guns and artillery, other Ming troops in the city were also equipped with about two thousand bird blunderbuss and thousands of other messy guns.
There are more than 300 small cannons weighing less than 100 kilograms, such as attacking cannons and tiger crouching cannons, and about 20 various artillery pieces such as general cannons weighing more than 100 kilograms, and Franco machine guns.
The entire garrison was equipped with about 4,000 pieces of iron armor of various types and 3,000 sets of bows.
In order to gather these weapons and equipment, Yang Sichang plundered almost the entire Chunan, and even mobilized some from neighboring Sichuan, Jiangxi, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong and other places.
For example, many of the reinforcements dispatched by Governor Pianyuan were actually guards from Guizhou, Sichuan and other places.
However, it is still not enough to resist the Chu thieves!
On the fourth day after arriving in Changsha, the Chu thieves made preparations to attack the city, and finally launched an attack on the tactical points of the outer-city positions built by the Ming army outside the city.
In just the first day of the attack, the city defenders led by Yang Sichang felt the huge pressure of the Chu army, and understood why the Chu thieves were able to fight consecutively, from Nanyang Mansion from north to south, to Hanyang, and then to kill again. to Wuchang, and now Changsha.
The Chu thieves' artillery was so powerful that it could not be resisted by manpower.
On the first day when the Chu bandits attacked the city, they used at least dozens of field guns of various types and an equal number of mortars.
The rumble of artillery continued for almost the entire day.
With the support of intensive artillery fire, multiple troops of the Chu army launched attacks on the peripheral defense nodes outside Changsha from multiple directions at the same time.
The Ming army's defensive nodes outside the city, especially the several strategically important hilltops with relatively high terrain where artillery could be deployed, were all captured by the Chu army on the first day of the war.
By evening, the Ming army had worked hard to build the peripheral positions outside Changsha for several months, but half of them had been lost.
Not to mention losing half of their troops, and the loss of troops was also extremely huge. In this day, the Ming army lost at least two thousand troops.
These two thousand people were either killed or injured, surrendered, or escaped, etc., and disappeared forever from the Ming army.
The result they achieved was only to kill about 300 Chu thieves in the counterattack.
Three hundred Chu thieves, which is nothing more than a drop in the bucket for an army of Chu thieves with a strength of forty or fifty thousand.
They suffered heavy losses on the first day of the war, which made Yang Sichang truly feel the power of the Chu thieves.
When these Chu thieves fought, their routines were completely different from the traditional fighting methods that people knew!
Before the Chu thieves attack, they will definitely carry out artillery bombardment, and the intensity of the artillery bombardment is far beyond people's imagination.
In the afternoon today, in order to capture a protruding defensive position built on a hill outside the Ming army's city, the Chu bandits frantically mobilized more than fifty artillery pieces, most of which were mortars, aimed at this small hill. Carry out bombardment.
The Ming army garrison on the hilltop did not resist at all in the face of such indiscriminate bombardment. Many people were killed and injured by mortar shells even if they were hiding in the trenches.
The breastworks and earthen fortifications constructed were very effective in defending against the five or even nine-pound field artillery among the Chu thieves.
The most important thing is that these Chu thieves did not even form a formation to launch an attack. Instead, like the rats, they directly dug trenches and approached, and after approaching twenty or thirty meters, they threw out an explosive bomb.
In the end, a group of heavy armored infantrymen of the Ming Army who were hiding in the trenches and were ready to rush out for a counterattack suffered heavy casualties!
After throwing the grenades, the Chu thieves rushed up one by one.
And these Chu thieves were all wearing armor. Among them, the spearmen, sword and shield hands, etc. were all heavily armored. Even the musketeers were wearing half-body armor.
Facing the fully armored Chu thieves, the remnants of the Ming army, who had been bombarded and killed by grenades, had already suffered heavy losses, and their morale had dropped to the extreme. They suffered many casualties without making effective resistance, and the remaining troops surrendered.
This fighting method made it difficult for the Ming army defending the city to adapt.
In particular, the method of digging trenches, getting close and then throwing grenades made many of the defensive tactics previously formulated by the Ming army ineffective.
Trenches, parapets, and earthen forts were no longer effective defenses against the rebels.
On the contrary, the effect of melee fighting in the traditional sense is better.
In today's battle, the reason why the Ming army was able to cause hundreds of casualties to the Chu army was that most of them were caused when they launched a counterattack.
The Ming army tried many times to suddenly launch a counterattack after the Chu thieves approached twenty or thirty meters before throwing grenades.
The soldiers did not form formations, but rushed out to fight. They relied on elite heavy-armored soldiers as the backbone to cause intensive damage to the Chu army.
Because there was no formation, the attacking Ming army seemed to be in a loose formation, but it moved much faster, not even giving the Chu thieves artillery time to react.
In this way, they can avoid being bombarded by Chu bandit artillery after forming a dense formation.
In addition, the Chu thieves seemed to be able to rely on various trenches to gradually approach and throw grenades, but this tactic had both gains and losses. The Chu thieves who relied on trenches to advance and fight were also unable to form formations.
When the Ming army launched a counterattack regardless of their formation, the Chu army had no time to organize their formation. They could only crawl out of the trenches and fight in a melee with the Ming army... If they didn't climb out, they would have died even more miserably while hiding in the trenches. The armored soldiers of the Ming army who would be rushed up would stand down and shoot holes in them...
This kind of sudden counterattack occurred many times today, and caused considerable losses to the Chu thieves.
It's just that this tactic relies heavily on the quality of individual soldiers. Those elite infantrymen wearing heavy armor are at home in this kind of melee, but ordinary guardsmen will die miserably in such situations.
The average individual quality of the Ming army and the popularity of armor were far inferior to those of the Chu thieves.
Therefore, in the actual melee, the Ming army's casualties still far exceeded those of the Chu thieves!
In the Battle of Linxiang, Yu Xiuwen had already tried this method to fight against the Chu thieves, but in the end Linxiang still fell!
In the face of absolute firepower and absolute armor coverage, all plots, tricks, and tactics came to nothing.
The Ming army's counterattack seems to be a bubble, but it is limited to a bubble...
