MTL - Han’s Son is Not a Slave-Chapter 1125 Target Qingdao

While busy reorganizing the army, Zhou Shixiang did not sit idly by the anti-Qing uprising that was breaking out in Shandong.

The Yuqi Uprising has spread throughout Denglai, Shandong Green Camp must be powerless, otherwise Sony will not rush to dispatch the Tuntai Department to Shandong to quell the chaos.

Taking advantage of people's illness will cost people their lives.

If Zhou Shixiang now takes advantage of Xuzhou's empty Qing army to go north, he will be able to occupy Xuzhou in one fell swoop, and take advantage of the situation to enter Shandong, get in touch with the Yu Qi uprising army, attack the Shandong Qing army before and after, and decide Shandong in one battle, and then form a frontal threat to Gyeonggi. . But doing so will undoubtedly overturn the strategy previously formulated, and urgently mobilize the army to the north, which is too late. By the time the Taiping army was assembled, the day lilies were cold, and it was impossible for Yu Qi's rebel army to last that long.

The military department formulated a plan overnight, that is, the Jiangbei Army will not be reorganized for the time being, but will be transferred to two or three towns, and Ge Yi will personally direct the northward advance to take Xuzhou at the least cost and the fastest speed.

Going north with a force of two to three towns can not only avoid mobilizing the army to go north and affect the ongoing army consolidation, but also save a lot of money and grain. The Jiangnan riots not only caused serious losses to the people, but also caused a sharp drop in Jiangsu's tax revenue this year. Now for disaster relief and post-disaster reconstruction, Zhou Shixiang had to return part of the military rations accumulated in Chongming, Songjiang and Taicang to the places. This is why the plan to go north to Liaodong had to be discontinued. Without the support of money and food, no matter how large the fleet is, it is impossible to make a difference in Liaodong, and it is even impossible to support North Korea to seek peace.

This plan of the military is obviously feasible, because the training and garrison of the Jiangbei Army is aimed at the Qing Army in Xuzhou. In terms of distance, it is also the closest to the Qing Army in Xuzhou, and the Jiangbei Army itself has a batch of grain reserves.

The Jiangbei Army took Xuzhou and then occupied the entire Shandong. Zhou Shixiang had no doubts, but he considered that once Shandong fell, whether the little emperors in Beijing and Manchu dignitaries would have the courage to stay there, waiting for the Central Plains' Aobai and He Wu Sangui decides the winner.

If the little emperor and Manchu dignitaries did not have the guts to stay in Beijing, and chose to take the wealth they looted for decades, and then coerce the people of Gyeonggi to withdraw from the customs, then occupying an empty city would be meaningless for the Taiping Army. Make future troubles even bigger. If he wanted to completely clean up and pacify Manchuria outside the customs in Liaodong, what Zhou Shixiang had to invest in was not as simple as two or three towns.

For a long time, Zhou Shixiang's attitude was that if he didn't go north, he would have to exterminate his clan and uproot Manchuria. He would never let a Manchurian Tartar escape out of the customs, from the old bangzi to the little cubs. To truly live, you must see people, and when you die, you must see corpses.

To this end, Zhou Shixiang ignored the opposition of the generals, and insisted on mobilizing the land and sea troops to fight in Liaodong. Although this bold and risky plan had to be aborted due to the Jiangnan riots, Zhou Shixiang never gave up on this plan.

Strategically, we must despise the enemy; tactically, we must pay attention to the enemy.

In his bones, Zhou Shi was actually afraid of Manchuria. What he feared was not the ferocity of Manchuria, but the "tenacity" of Manchuria.

Why did the Ming Dynasty have beacon smoke everywhere in the Central Plains, why did the Jiashen change, why did the three emperors die, and why 156 large and small cities were massacred? "Liao affairs" brought down the Ming Dynasty alive.

If Manzhou is out of the customs, it means that this "Liao affair" will continue. Zhou Shixiang could not tolerate such a situation, and he would not allow Manzhou to survive like Beiyuan back then and become a frontier trouble for the Han people.

Manzhou is not a nomadic people, but a fishing and hunting people. It is impossible for them to run around on the grasslands like the Mongols. When one stronghold is burned down, they flee to another stronghold, using the vast grasslands and Ming army guerrillas. In the past, Emperor Chengzu was out of the fortress five times, but he was still unable to completely eliminate the Mongols. As a result, more than ten years later, a change in the civil fort made the Ming Dynasty realize once again that the Mongolian wolf still had the ability to bite back.

But there is no prairie outside the customs, but there are vast forests. The Taiping army can occupy the towns, but they cannot capture the Manchus one by one in the vast forests and behead them. It is also impossible to divide the troops to defend each point one by one, and then they will fall back into the situation of the Ming army in Liaodong decades ago. At that time, there were still three million Han Chinese people to support the Ming army outside the customs, but now, there is not a single Han outside the customs. Relying solely on the support of food distribution within the customs, the Taiping army is like a dilapidated house outside the customs, and the wind is everywhere. As long as there is a little carelessness, the tragedy of Saar Hu will occur again, and it will never end.

More importantly, it is impossible for Zhou Shixiang to station a large army outside the customs for a long time. If there are fewer garrisoned troops, it will not be able to deal with the Manchus; According to the existing population of the Ming Dynasty, it would not be possible to develop the outside of the customs into the northeast that Zhou Shixiang knew in his previous life, so Zhou Shixiang insisted on going north to Liaodong, cutting the way for Manchuria to exit the customs, and blocking them in Shanhaiguan. Even if this plan is not in the interests of the Taiping army at all at the moment, it is not conducive to the recovery of the north. He insisted on it.

In order to prevent the Manchu Qing from going out, Zhou Shixiang even secretly ordered a Taiping army disguised as the Qing army to contain the hundreds of thousands of loyal camps that blocked the northward movement under the sailors of Tang San. Earlier, there was even a cavalry who fought with Wu Zhimao, the pioneer of the Wu army, as the Eight Banners. , If these two things are announced, the anti-Qing hero halo above Zhou Shixiang's head will immediately become dim, and there will be criticisms both inside and outside the army.

After the military proposal was rejected, Guo Xiong thought that Zhou Shixiang would ignore Shandong, but soon, he was ordered to draft a battle document for the East China Sea Fleet.

On land, Zhou Shixiang would not send one soldier and one soldier northward, but he would not ignore the anti-Qing rebels in Shandong. Whether in the name of the Dingwu court or in the name of Zhou Shixiang, the king of Qi, the Taiping army must show goodwill and support to the anti-Qing rebels in Shandong.

Zheng Mingjun, the general town of the East China Sea Division, who was resting in Zhoushan and preparing to go north to Liaodong, received an urgent order from the military, ordering the East China Sea Division to immediately set off for the north, with the goal of capturing Qingdao Port in Laizhou, Shandong.

Qingdao is not a place name of the Ming Dynasty, but a new place name created by Zhou Shixiang on the coast of Laizhou, which was originally the location of the Laizhou navy in the Ming Dynasty. After Kong Youde failed in the rebellion in Dengzhou, he went to sea in Qingdao Port to join Houjin. Before he left, a fire burned down the Laizhou water camp. After the Qing army entered the customs, the remnants of the Denglai Navy surrendered to the Manchus. The Qing court rebuilt the Laizhou Water Camp, which was located in Qingdao Port. However, because the Qing Dynasty did not pay attention to the navy, and there were no Ming army navy activities in the north, the Laizhou water battalion has not been paid attention to by the Qing court. . It is said that Laizhou Shuiying also lifted those people up.

Zhou Shixiang asked Zheng Mingjun to lead the East Sea Division to seize Qingdao Port, annihilate the poor dozens of ships of the Laizhou Water Camp, and build Qingdao into a port for the East Sea Division and become a transit battle for the future northward Liaodong army.

After Zheng Mingjun received the order, he immediately discussed how to seize Qingdao with his nephew, the Marquis of Jianping Zheng Zanxu, the ambassador of the Donghai Division An Jun, and Simingbo Feng Xifan.

During the period of rest in Zhoushan, Zheng Mingjun and Feng Xifan have not been idle. They have already sent a clipper to survey the seaways along the way, and they have found the old man from the Zheng family who went north to Denglai to do business. nautical charts and current surveying and mapping results. Generally speaking, Zheng Mingjun and the others are very confident about going north.

The name of Qingdao is very unfamiliar to Zheng Mingjun and the others, but they are familiar with the Jiaolai Canal. In the Yuan Dynasty, in order to facilitate the transportation of grain by sea, a sea canal was opened in the Shandong Peninsula, called the Jiaolai Canal.

In addition to occupying Qingdao, Zheng Mingjun and the others also have a mission to fully support the Yuqi Uprising Army in Denglai. Zhou Shixiang asked them to get in touch with the rebel army immediately after they occupied Qingdao, and send them food, grass and weapons and equipment, and with the consent of Qi et al. Help the rebel army and Shandong Qing army fight.

Zheng Mingjun's subordinates have a certain number of iron armored soldiers, and even some Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese. These were originally private soldiers recruited and raised by Zheng Tai during his lifetime. After Zheng Tai's death, because they were Zheng Tai's private soldiers, it was impossible for these people to gain the trust of Zheng Jing, so most of them followed Zheng Mingjun's uncle and nephew to join the Taiping Army. Zhou Shi also treated these people equally. UU Reading www.uukanshu.com did not ask Zheng Mingjun's uncle and nephew to hand over the people, but continued to stay in the East Sea Division, forming a marine army with a number of less than a thousand people. The Marines are internally called the Marine Corps.

After formulating the plan to go north, Zheng Mingjun immediately ordered his nephew Zheng Zanxu to lead 240 large and small warships and more than 6,000 sailors to the north. Two days later, he and Feng Xifan led the remaining more than 300 warships and more than 12,000 sailors of the East Sea Division Lift anchor and head north.

Occupying Qingdao and destroying the Laizhou water camp with only a few dozen ships was nothing to the huge Donghai Navy. But this time the navy went north, but it was another huge gathering of the Ming navy since the war against Japanese in the Wanli period. It was also the first time the Ming army set foot on the land closest to Beijing since Jiashen. It's far bigger than a normal naval battle.

Zhou Shixiang specifically requested that the East Sea navy can only operate in a hundred miles around Qingdao, and must not appear in the coastal area of ​​Tianjin. This was done to prevent the navy from being self-defeating and scaring the little emperors of Beijing and Manchu dignitaries. However, if the Qing court was frightened to leave the customs just because the Ming army navy appeared on the coast of Shandong, then Zhou Shi could only express helplessness, thinking that he still overestimated the courage of the Manchu uncles.

When the Donghai Division departed from Zhoushan and arrived in Chongming to replenish fresh water and food, the latest news of the war in Henan was sent to Zhou Shixiang's desk.