時報
- Two Armies Fight at Tianjiazhen
- Supplementary Account of How the Allied Army Retook Nanchang
- Military News from All Quarters
This page of Shibao from 15 October 1926 followed the Northern Expedition's war in Jiangxi and Hubei. Jiujiang dispatches dated the 13th reported renewed clashes at Tianjiazhen on the Yangtze bank, with warships rushed in as reinforcements, and fierce but undecided fighting around Nanchang since the 12th. A Reuters line said Jiang Zhenchen's troops in the Ji'an sector had been pushed back toward Linjiang. A long-delayed correspondent's letter, carried by the Toho News Agency, described how Sun Chuanfang's allied army fought back after the Party Army entered Nanchang on the evening of the 19th, nearly forcing a river crossing on the 21st as Deng Ruzhuo's brigades converged. A fragmentary column of military news described a besieged city opening its gates and Northern soldiers laying down their arms, and listed headquarters business, including a telegram from Wu Peifu and orders on garrison officials.
This reading covers three military items from the page's news columns. Small print in the advertisements and many news columns is blurred, broken or cut off at tile edges, and the translations mark the gaps with ellipses. Some personal names, such as a brigade commander in a Jiujiang item, and characters at column breaks could not be read with confidence and were left untranscribed. The OCR candidate was heavily garbled and was not relied on where the image is illegible. Other items on the page, including a report from Nanjing, are outside this reading.
Translation
Two Armies Fight at Tianjiazhen
◉ Two Armies Fight at Tianjiazhen
◎ The two armies have again clashed at Tianjiazhen … warships are now being urgently dispatched as reinforcements … (Jiujiang, 13th)
◎ Near Tianjiazhen on the bank of the Yangtze … for a time … (Jiujiang, 13th)
◉ No Decisive Battle Yet near Nanchang
◎ On the Nanchang front the two armies have been clashing since yesterday (the 12th) and are now locked in fierce fighting; it seems not yet … (Jiujiang, 13th)
Supplementary Account of How the Allied Army Retook Nanchang
… a great decisive battle. (Reuters, Beijing, 14th) Jiang Zhenchen's army in the Ji'an sector has been pushed back by the Southern army to the vicinity of Linjiang.
Supplementary Account of How the Allied Army Retook Nanchang (Toho News Agency, Shanghai, 14th) … communications have been cut for more than half a month. Only yesterday did we receive a correspondent's letter dated the 29th of last month describing the circumstances before and after the Allied Army's recapture of Nanchang. We record it as follows. On the evening of the 19th, after the Party Army advanced into and occupied Nanchang, the Jiangsu forces at Shajing across the river fought the Party Army; the sound of artillery and rifle fire was heaviest at night. At the time the Jiangsu army held the upper position, and on the evening of the 21st it very nearly charged across the river. Deng Ruzhuo, moreover, had the 9th and 2nd brigades and Liu Baoti's mixed brigade in Jiangxi converge to attack. The divisions belonging to the …6th, 2nd, 3rd and other armies in Nanchang were all sent off to the front … commander Cheng Qian came to the positions in person. By the morning of the 23rd, the revolutionary army's rear-defense command …
Military News from All Quarters
… the rest were all willing to open the city and were eager to get out of the city; hence the revolutionary army from time to time rose … the revolutionary army surrounded the city and attacked … obeyed orders … Yu Yinsen's unit … ten … Tongxiang, Zhonghe, Pinghu, Wangshan … the troops poured in; the Northern soldiers all laid down their arms … and others. It is heard that those who came to Hankou … inside the university; that university, because it was on very cordial terms with these people …
▲ Allied Army war report: … received … Yangtze … victorious … all units … for several days at Gong'an …
▲ Headquarters received a telegram from Wu Peifu … delivered, and decided to set out by separate routes that very day …
▲ Government offices of the provincial capital and philanthropists …
▲ Headquarters holds the local officials of the garrisons at Huai, Xu and Hai responsible; they should be given [the powers of] law-enforcement officers of the General Headquarters …
▲ The Allied Army's 2nd Division, from mixed …
Context
How Nanchang changed hands in September 1926
The Toho News Agency letter in the second item narrates a sequence that matches the broad outline of the Jiangxi campaign. At an August conference in Changsha the Nationalists had decided to strike Wu Peifu's stronghold of Wuchang directly, bypassing Sun Chuanfang's Nanchang. Sun, however, refused to place his administration under Kuomintang rule even after being offered a non-aggression pact, and Chiang Kai-shek attacked across the Jiangxi border on 4 September. By 19 September Jiujiang and Nanchang were in Nationalist hands, helped by the defection of Sun's general Lai Shih-huang; the letter's date for the Party Army's entry into Nanchang, the evening of the 19th, fits that chronology. Sun then arrived from Nanjing with reinforcements on 21 September and forced the Nationalist offensive into retreat, which matches the letter's account of the allied troops nearly charging across the river that evening. The names of Deng Ruzhuo's brigades and of Cheng Qian at the front are details given by the letter itself. Sun's recovery was brutal: he retook most of the lost territory and killed hundreds of students, teachers and suspected Kuomintang members. The headline's "recapture" thus records a real reversal, though one that lasted only weeks.
Sun Chuanfang's five-province coalition behind the "Allied Army"
The "Allied Army" (聯軍) of these reports was the coalition of Sun Chuanfang, which in 1926 controlled Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui and Jiangxi. Sun had set up his headquarters at Nanjing as military governor of Jiangsu on 25 November 1925, and at the height of his power he commanded an army of more than 200,000 men. The Guangzhou government offered him a non-aggression pact, but he would not subordinate his administration to Kuomintang rule, so Jiangxi became the next battlefield once Wu Peifu's forces were in retreat. The page's vocabulary reflects that structure. The Nanchang letter calls Sun's troops opposite the city the "Su" army, using the short name for Jiangsu, the province from which Sun ruled, while the enemy appears as the "Party Army" and the "revolutionary army." The third column's items on "Headquarters" and on the allied 2nd Division show the same command handling garrison officials and appointments away from the front line.
Where the Jiangxi fighting stood in mid-October
The Jiujiang dispatches of 13 October describe a front that had not yet settled: renewed clashes at Tianjiazhen on the Yangtze bank, warships rushed in as reinforcements, and fierce fighting around Nanchang since the 12th with no decision. The Reuters line that Jiang Zhenchen's troops had been pushed from the Ji'an sector toward Linjiang suggests that the allied side was also under pressure from the south. On 11 October the American consul general at Hankow had reported that about 9,000 Northern soldiers arrived at Jiujiang from upriver the previous day, which he read as a gradual withdrawal from the region between Hankou and Jiujiang. Events soon turned against Sun. On 16 October his subordinate Xia Chao declared Zhejiang independent, and although Sun put down that revolt, by the end of October his forces were again in retreat across Jiangxi and Fujian. The undecided battles on this page therefore fall in the last days before Sun's hold on Jiangxi gave way.
What happened at Wuchang after 10 October
The broken opening of the third column appears to describe the end of a siege: defenders willing to open the city, the revolutionary army surrounding and attacking it, troops pouring in amid the names Tongxiang, Zhonghe, Pinghu and Wangshan, Northern soldiers laying down their arms, and people inside a university. These details are consistent with the fall of Wuchang. Wu Peifu and most of his army had fled north to Henan, and on 10 October his remaining forces at Wuchang surrendered, completing the Nationalist conquest of Hubei. The American consul general at Hankow reported that the Southerners had taken the city that morning through a ruse, that Northerners in the rout discarded their arms and uniforms, and that eyewitnesses estimated several hundred casualties. He added that General Liu Yuchun, sheltering in the home of an absent American in the Boone University compound, had been captured, and that disarmed soldiers were offered the choice of joining the Southern army or going free, with many joining. The paper's remark about a university on cordial terms with "these people" may concern the same episode, but the legible text names neither Wuchang nor Liu. The same column mentions a telegram from Wu Peifu, whose remaining army would disintegrate over the following months.
Original
田家鎮兩軍作戰
◉ 田家鎮兩軍作戰 ◎ 兩軍於田家鎮又發生衝現急派軍艦增援、 （九江十三日 ◎ 揚子江岸田家鎮附近、 一時、 （九江十三日 ◉ 南昌附近未決戰 ◎ 南昌方面兩軍自昨 （十二） 日衝突、 現正在激戰、 似尚未 （九江十三日
聯軍奪回南昌情形補誌
大決戰、 （北京十四日路透電） 將鎮臣軍在吉安方面被南軍壓退至臨江附近、 聯軍奪回南昌情形補誌 （東方社十四日上海消息） 信不通、 已逾半月、 昨始接到上月二十九日訪函陳聯軍奪回南昌前後情形、 錄之如左、 十九日晚、 黨軍進佔南昌後、 其在對河沙井之蘇與黨軍作戰、 砲聲槍聲、 以夜晚爲甚、 時蘇軍在上、 二十一日晚幾乎衝鋒過江、 而鄧如琢復在贛有九二兩旅及劉寶題混成旅會集進攻、 在南昌六第二第三等軍所屬師團、 均完全開赴前敵、 長程潛親臨陣地、 及至二十三日早、 革軍後防司
各方軍事消息
、 其餘則均願開城、 急欲出城、 故革軍時起、 革軍環城而攻聽命、 余蔭森部之十通湘中和平湖望山隊擁入、 北兵均釋械等諸人、 聞來漢者大學內、 該大學爲與諸人感情極洽、 ▲ 聯軍戰報、 接長江勝各部、 連日在公安 ▲ 總部接吳佩孚來電運到、 決定即日分路 ▲ 省垣官廳及慈善家 ▲ 總部以淮徐海駐軍地方官負責、 應予以總司令部執法官、 ▲ 聯軍第二師、 由混