The Ming army's two-pronged offensive, one from the south and the other from the north, formed a pincer-shaped offensive and met in the west of Hami. The big pliers were closed, and Hami and the surrounding areas were surrounded.
Entering the Hami region is considered entering Xinjiang. Surrounding Hami is an oasis belt more than 100 kilometers wide, running east-west, and the road into Xinjiang passes through the oasis. Now, the two Soviet armored divisions,
Three infantry divisions and about 150,000 people were ordered to defend Hami at all costs. Facing the Ming army that drove straight in, the Soviet army in Hami was compressed smaller and smaller, and they watched helplessly as they were surrounded.
In the classroom of any military academy, every student knows that this is a taboo. When there is a lot of strategic depth, it is impossible to let hundreds of thousands of troops be surrounded in order to hold on to a certain place. Correct
The best approach is to withdraw in time before the encirclement is closed. Because hundreds of thousands of troops are not a small number, for any country's army, the loss of 150,000 troops is a serious loss of vitality. Unless it is like something like
Strategically important places like Turpan and Dihua both guard the Tianshan Pass and are the gateway to northern Xinjiang. However, Hami, with its vast surrounding terrain and flat rivers, has a very large room for maneuver. It is nothing more than guarding the highway. And this is Hami.
It is no more special than Yumen and Guazhou.
However, Stalin issued a fatal order, prohibiting the Hami garrison from breaking out, forbidding them to take a step back, and promising to send reinforcements immediately. Therefore, the commander of the Hami garrison did not dare to break out, but held on to Hami desperately. This also allowed the Ming army to encircle and annihilate a large number of people at once.
Opportunities for the Soviet Army.
The siege of Hami began. The goal of the Ming army was to capture the five divisions in the encirclement before the Soviet army mobilized reinforcements to counterattack. Because the Soviet army in the Hami encirclement only had two armored divisions and more than 200 tanks, so
The Ming army had a great advantage in tanks. Fang Dongcheng mobilized five People's Guard armored divisions to besiege Hami, with a brigade of dive bombers as air support.
Ming and Soviet fighter jets were bombing fiercely in the sky, while dive bombers from both sides were targeting the other side's troops for bombing...
The fighting was fierce in the sky, but on the ground, beyond the expectations of Fang Dongcheng and the Ming Dynasty officers and soldiers, the siege went surprisingly smoothly. The Soviet soldiers in the encirclement seemed to have suffered a nervous breakdown. They did not stick to the fixed defense line at all, but became chaotic.
The regiment was firing randomly, and many guns and bullets were flying inward. When the dive bombers roared down, many Soviet soldiers even rushed out of their hiding places, covering their heads and running around in the open space. Some
He also shot behind him and threw grenades.
…
Shi Shengli's regiment had approached a larger village outside Hami City. His tank was hidden behind a low mound, with only the barrel and a little above the turret exposed. The barrel was stretched straight out, pointing at the distance.
Village. He leaned out from the turret and observed carefully with a telescope. Like others, he was also puzzled by the strange behavior of the Soviet army.
"That's not right..." he murmured, "The Soviet army always likes to hide in residential buildings and use civilians as human shields when they fight in the streets with us... What happened today?"
After a moment, his eyes suddenly widened and he held his breath.
At the entrance of the village in the distance, an old man came out with a rifle, aimed at the back of a Soviet soldier and shot him. The muzzle flashed, white smoke drifted by, and the Soviet soldier more than ten meters away fell to the ground.
Then, the old man pulled the bolt of the gun, fired again, and killed a Soviet soldier with one shot. He was probably an old hunter, and his marksmanship was very accurate.
At this moment, more than a dozen villagers rushed out with scythes and hoes, chasing several Soviet soldiers to cut them. Several of them had rifles in their hands. They seemed to be Soviet Mosin Nagants. It looked like they were all Soviet soldiers.
After firing the bullets, use it as a bayonet.
The Soviet soldiers each fired a shot and knocked down two villagers. Then they had no time to pull the bolt and started fighting with several villagers with bayonets. There were so many villagers that they cut down several Soviet soldiers to the ground in a blink of an eye.
One of the big men looked clearly not Han. He pulled out a small knife from his boot, bent down and quickly slit the throats of several Soviet soldiers.
Suddenly, an earth wall collapsed, and a Soviet tank came out, puffing out smoke. Without saying a word, the front machine gun sprayed flames, and more than a dozen villagers were mopped down in an instant. The tank turned its body.
, directly ran over the pile of corpses of villagers and Soviet soldiers, while turning the turret, aiming at the Ming army tank at the other end of the street and firing...
Shi Shengli understood immediately. The people in the village saw that the Ming army was attacking, so they seized this opportunity and began to resist.
The Soviet army was overwhelmed by the sudden outbreak of riots. There was also a fierce attack by the Ming army outside, and they did not even have time to suppress it. The original complete defensive deployment was completely disrupted. Should the guns be aimed at the Ming army outside or not?
For the people inside, it all depends on whether the situation outside is more serious or the situation inside. As a result, the Soviet army's approach is different at every point along the entire defense line, and the field telephone lines across the village have long been cut into pieces.
It's over, the division can't contact the regiment, the regiment can't contact the battalion, the battalion can't contact the company, the whole thing is a mess. In addition, the Ming army's dive bombers overhead are screaming like ghosts, and the artillery shells and bombs are screaming and falling...
…Soviet positions in many places were directly in chaos.
Shi Shengli was so excited that he quickly reported the situation while holding the telescope in one hand and the headset in the other.
…
And his report was also very timely. At this time, the division headquarters had received a report saying that a riot seemed to have occurred in the village. Because it was reported by the commander of a tank that was fighting, the division headquarters was worried about the chaos on the battlefield.
False alarm. Now I suddenly received a report from tank commander Shi Shengli, and it was immediately confirmed.
In the next hour, the headquarters of several divisions of the Ming Army received similar reports. Basically, more than a dozen villages around Hami were in riots. The group army headquarters immediately ordered the attached Army Aviation Unit to eliminate the most recent
A good fighter pilot flies a fighter jet low over Hami City to observe the situation in the city.
Soon, the Army Aviation Force reported again that there was chaos in the city of Hami. The Soviet army drove tanks and shot at the people on the streets, and the people were like crazy, attacking the Soviet army everywhere... The Ming army has not yet entered the city of Hami.
"Street fighting" has begun in Hami City. The Ming Army Group Army Headquarters did not have time to ask Lanzhou for instructions. It made a prompt decision and ordered dive bombers to start bombing Hami City. The target was the Soviet tanks parked on the street. As for accidental injuries to citizens, they could not control it.
.
At an order, two squadrons of dive bombers flew urgently over Hami City, dispersed, each selected a target, and began to dive and drop bombs.
There are not many Soviet tanks in the city. They were all rushed in from outside the city to suppress the uprising after it started. There are only a dozen of them. Now these tanks occupy the main street intersections in the city, as well as the vegetable market and the mosque in the city center.
An open space like a square. The tanks were parked there, the turrets were slowly rotating in a scary way, and the coaxial machine guns were spitting out flames from time to time, shooting at all the civilians that could be seen within the field of view. There were corpses everywhere on the street, and blood was everywhere.
The stone slabs on both sides of the road had merged into a creek. More citizens either hid in the alleys or climbed on the roofs, waiting for opportunities to attack the Soviet troops with captured Soviet guns.
A dive bomber pounced down, with a shrill roar, and three bombs fell rapidly. The street was filled with thick smoke, and the nearby houses collapsed. White dust and black smoke rolled alternately, covering half of the street.
In the smoke and dust, a large fireball suddenly shot up into the sky - the tank exploded.