Gou was a member of the imperial family in the late Ming Dynasty

Chapter 787 No Man’s Land

Although he was somewhat dissatisfied, Chen Xinjia did not scold the other party. After all, it was not easy for Zheng Hongkui and Li You to do this at their level.

They were far away in Liaodong, how could they know how much the capital valued this matter? Moreover, as a military commander, even though Zheng Hongkui was already a deputy general and actually held the position of general, and would definitely be promoted to general after this battle, he was not qualified to directly offer the other party overly generous conditions.

But Chen Xinjia was different. He was the Minister of War, the second-in-command of the Ministry of War. Moreover, he was a civil servant and an imperial envoy who came here with an imperial decree. Naturally, he had the right to act at his own discretion.

Chen Xinjia immediately told them to send someone to contact Tun Tashi right away and tell him that as long as he was willing to surrender to the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty would at least give him a military post of deputy general, and it was even possible to confer a title on him. As for other rewards, the same was true. He would definitely not be treated unfairly with high positions and generous salaries. There was no time to lose and this matter had to be done as soon as possible.

Because of this incident, Chen Xinjia ended the banquet early, inquired carefully about Tunta Xi's situation, wrote a letter personally, stamped it with his seal of imperial envoy and seal of assistant minister of the Ministry of War, and handed it to Jing Wuer to send someone to contact Tunta Xi again.

In addition, Chen Xinjia also carefully inquired about the situation of the other eight banners, selected several middle and lower-level generals from the Bordered Blue Banner and the Plain White Banner, and sent people to test them to see if they could be won over. The more they could be won over, the greater the benefit to the Ming Dynasty.

According to Chen Xinjia's request, this matter was quickly implemented. After the arrangement was completed, Chen Xinjia also inquired about the current tactics of continuing the guerrilla warfare in Liaodong, but Chen Xinjia did not intervene too much in this matter. Although he was a superior, he did not take over the troops, because before coming, Zhu Shenzhu reminded him that the military was mainly Zheng Hongkui and Li You, who had fought well in Liaodong. Since they had considerable experience in this tactic, let them continue to command the army and do not intervene too much.

Chen Xinjia was different from ordinary civil servants. Having been at the border for a long time, he knew very well that everyone had their own specialties, and he also knew the consequences of intervening without understanding tactics. So he only proposed one point, hoping that Zheng Hongkui and Li You could continue to conduct guerrilla warfare in Liaodong, put pressure on Liaodong, force Huang Taiji to return to support as soon as possible, and also make a gesture for the Eight Banners to surrender to the Ming Dynasty. As for how to do it, how to do it, and to what extent, these were all judged by Zheng Hongkui and Li You themselves.

Soon after Chen Xinjia arrived at Ludao, the Ming army in Ludao began to move. Zheng Hongkui and Li You discussed and decided to attack Zhuanghe first, but Zhuanghe was not their main target of attack, because Jing Wuer and Guan Bao's surrender to the Ming led to Chengzitan being occupied by the Ming army. When the Ming army withdrew, they burned Chengzitan to ashes. Moreover, after the two Niulu of the Zhenglan Banner in Chengzitan surrendered to the Ming, Duroberle Yuetuo's troops stopped their westward advance. Coupled with the disastrous defeat of the navy, Yuetuo divided his troops to guard Pidao and Korea, with his main force near Zhuanghe.

Zheng Hongkui and Li You were not so stupid as to lead their troops to confront Yue Tuo in Zhuanghe. Although the new army was capable of fighting, they were still short of manpower for a decisive battle with Yue Tuo's main force. Moreover, even if they won, their own losses would certainly not be small.

Their main purpose in Liaodong was to fight guerrilla warfare and harassment, not to fight a decisive battle with the enemy. So the purpose of sending troops to Zhuanghe was just to attract Yue Tuo's attention and make Yue Tuo mistakenly believe that the Ming army was going to land in Zhuanghe.

The real target of Zheng Hongkui and Li You was not Zhuanghe, but Donggou and Zhenjiangbao (Dandong) east of Ludao. Attacking Zhuanghe was just a way to lure the tiger away from the mountain, so that Yuetuo could focus on Zhuanghe first. Once Yuetuo mistakenly thought that the Ming army was going to land in Zhuanghe, the main force of the Ming army suddenly appeared in Donggou and Zhenjiangbao, and hit Yuetuo hard from behind, which would be enough for him to bear.

This was indeed the case. After learning that the Ming army planned to land in Zhuanghe, Yue Tuo treated it as a formidable enemy and immediately assembled his forces to prepare for a battle with the Ming army in Zhuanghe. However, after waiting for several days, he did not see any landing troops from the Ming army. Suspicious, Yue Tuo sent scouts to check, only to discover that the Ming army's navy had not docked at all. They had just fired a few shots at the shore from the sea, pretending to be landing, and then went back.

For several days, the Ming navy came in the morning and left in the evening, and no one knew what was going on. Just when Yuetuo was puzzled, news suddenly came from the east that the Ming navy and army took advantage of the gap in the northeastern troop mobilization to suddenly land in Donggou. Jing Wuer and Guan Bao's troops disguised as Yuetuo's reinforcements went straight in and suddenly launched an attack that caught the Donggou garrison off guard.

The Ming army did not fight with the Eight Banners troops in Donggou for a long time. After gaining some advantage in the sneak attack, they fled. The Bordered Blue Banner troops in Donggou suffered a loss and were furious, waiting for the Ming army to continue attacking and teach the Ming army a lesson. However, the Ming army appeared in Zhenjiang Fort in the blink of an eye. It took only half a day to directly break through the Zhenjiang Fort with only a hundred people stationed there with intensive firepower. Not only did they empty the supplies of Zhenjiang Fort, they also burned down the Fort.

When the reinforcements from Donggou arrived quickly, they did not even catch the tail of the Ming army. They only saw Zhenjiang Fort which had been burned to ruins and a mess.

"Too much deception! Too much deception!"

Upon receiving the news, Yue Tuo was so angry that he trembled all over. He was a dignified Duoluo Beile, a fierce general of the Qing Dynasty. How could he have fought such a cowardly battle? This battle was really too aggrieved.

The Ming army took advantage of the convenience of sea transportation and could fight and go wherever they wanted along the Liaodong coast, while they had to set up defenses everywhere and were attacked everywhere, being led by the nose by the Ming army. Moreover, their navy was gone, and the navy that had come from Pi Island was completely useless. They had originally planned to fight the navy with the navy, and even if they could not destroy the enemy's warships, they could still restrain the enemy from coming and going recklessly on the sea.

But he didn't expect that his navy would be so vulnerable. Although his warships were larger than the Ming navy, they were easily defeated by the enemy, and even the commander of the navy was killed on the spot. This result was something Yue Tuo had never expected. With the destruction of the navy, Yue Tuo could only defend on land and passively engage in battle.

That’s not all. The two damn bastards Jing Wuer and Guan Bao betrayed the Qing Dynasty and actually surrendered to the Ming Dynasty. They even raised the banner of “anti-Qing and pro-Ming” and served as the vanguard of the Ming army. This caused an uproar within the Eight Banners. No one expected that such a thing would actually happen.

If it was a battle between two armies, Yue Tuo would not be afraid of the Ming army at all. But now such tactics made the experienced Yue Tuo at a loss. He had never fought such a battle and really couldn't adapt.

In desperation, Yue Tuo felt that it was really aggrieved to continue to passively take the beating. If he continued, not only would he not be able to defeat the Ming army, but his morale would also be lowered. In order to solve this problem, Yue Tuo thought of a way. He planned to withdraw all the Eight Banners troops along the coast, including the local Han army, Baoyi and Liao people, to the inland, and directly create a buffer zone at least 50 miles wide from the Liaodong coast to the inland.

Once this isolation zone was formed, the Ming army would find itself in an area 50 miles inland from landing, and if they wanted to attack the Eight Banners as they had done before, they would have to go deep inland. After going such a long distance, the landing troops would not only lose support from the sea, but once the two armies fought, it would not be as easy for the Ming army to transfer or withdraw, regardless of the outcome.

In other words, Yue Tuo's method was to trade space for time, using the isolation zone to eliminate the Ming army's ability to attack him from everywhere by taking advantage of the sea. If this was achieved, the Ming army's original tactics would be useless, and as long as he dealt with the situation properly inland, he could quickly catch the Ming army's movements after the Ming army penetrated deep into the territory with the speed and mobility of his cavalry, and then dispatch troops to encircle and annihilate them.

It must be said that Yue Tuo's method seems to be good and quite practical. Once Yue Tuo succeeds in this way, it will be much more difficult for Zheng Hongkui and Li You to continue fighting as before.

Of course, Yue Tuo's method is also a trick of killing one thousand enemies and injuring eight hundred of his own. It can even be said that killing one thousand enemies and injuring two thousand of his own. It is easy to say that the isolation zone (no man's land) of about fifty miles is easy to say, but don't forget that the coastline of Liaodong is extremely long, several thousand miles from west to east, and such a long coastline is inhabited by many Liao people and even Jurchens. They rely on reclamation and planting, including fishing for a living. The family's property is all here, and once it moves inland, all the belongings will have to be abandoned. How can ordinary people afford this loss?

But Yue Tuo didn't care about these things at all. His mind was full of ideas about how to deal with the Ming army. Moreover, as a nobleman and a general of the Qing Dynasty, how could he care about the lives of ordinary people? In his opinion, if he could sacrifice these people and achieve the possibility of annihilating this Ming army, Yue Tuo would definitely be willing to do so.

It has to be said that the Jurchens' thinking is indeed different from that of normal people. When a problem cannot be solved, they will first solve the people who created the problem even if they have to sacrifice themselves, even if these people are on their side.

The same is true in history. Originally, after the Qing Dynasty entered the Pass and won the world, it still faced anti-Qing forces from all sides. Among them, there were several most powerful remnant Ming armies, and Zheng Chenggong in Little Ryukyu was one of them. Zheng Chenggong used the advantage of the navy to attack everywhere along the southeast coast, making the Qing army miserable. At his strongest, he led hundreds of thousands of elite troops to join forces with the Southern Ming army to march north, and almost captured Nanjing City to recover half of the Ming Dynasty. This frightened Dorgon in the capital and made him live in a panic all day long.

Unfortunately, Zheng Chenggong made a wrong choice and took the families of his troops with him too early. He originally wanted to use this arrangement to stabilize the morale of the army, but he did not expect that this move would cause his army to lose its aggressiveness, resulting in lax military discipline and weakened combat effectiveness.

Coupled with command errors and insufficient troops, the Qing army counterattacked and Zheng Chenggong was ultimately defeated. He had no choice but to withdraw from the mainland and return to Xiaoliuqiu due to heavy casualties. This battle can be said to be the last battle in history that could have restored the Ming Dynasty. Unfortunately, it ended in such a failure, which is extremely regrettable.

After the war, in order to prevent Zheng Chenggong from making a comeback, the Qing Dynasty directly issued an order to close the sea and an order to relocate people. After these two orders were issued, a large number of people who relied on the sea for their survival in the southeastern coastal areas moved inland, creating a vacuum (no man's land) dozens or even hundreds of miles wide in the coastal areas. This stupid method was used to prevent the other side from repeating the same landing operation.

Yuetuo's current methods are almost identical to those used by the Qing Dynasty in history, which is really laughable.

(End of this chapter)