The poet Li Bai's poem Farewell to the Red Cliff depicts the war situation in the "Battle of Red Cliffs" in the late Eastern Han Dynasty.
In 2008, after Cao Cao occupied Jingzhou, he assembled more than 200,000 troops (so-called 830,000) and prepared to occupy the Jiangdong area south to eliminate the resistance forces of Sun Quan and Liu Bei. Sun Quan appointed Zhou Yu as the main general, and led 30,000 and Liu Bei to form a joint army of Sun Liu and * * * against Cao Jun. The two sides confronted each other across the Chibi section of the Yangtze River, and Cao Cao stepped up training the water army on the north bank of the river, waiting for an opportunity to attack. Zhou Yu used the weather to set fire to Cao Jun's warships. Cao Jun was defeated, and Sun and Liu joined hands to go hand in hand with water and land, and pursued them with all their strength. Cao Jun lost more than half.
Battle of Red Cliffs's failure made Cao Cao lose the possibility of reunifying the whole country in a short time, while Sun and Liu used the victory of this campaign to continuously develop and expand their sphere of influence, laying a political pattern of tripartite confrontation among the three countries.
Chibi ancient battlefield
The reason why "Battle of Red Cliffs" occupied an important historical position in China for nearly 2,000 years is that Sun Liu's alliance with the enemy had a far-reaching impact on the establishment of the Three Kingdoms. The reason why later generations lost to the powerful Cao Cao Group is generally believed that Zhou Yu successfully launched a fire attack with his strategy.
Reflection? Shu Shu? "Ancestors" records: "The ancestors sent Zhuge Liang to bind Sun Quan, and authorized Zhou Yu, Cheng Pu and other tens of thousands of water troops to join forces with the ancestors, to fight with Cao Gong in Chibi, break it and burn his ship." The word "burn" means that Sun Liulian defeated Cao Jun by fire attack.
Reflection? Wu Shu? Zhou Yu's biography wrote: "Cao Gongjun's officials and scholars craned their necks to look at them, pointing to those words and covering them up." When the ship is built and the wind is strong, it is obvious that it will burn and camp on the shore. Awkward. The smoke burned for a long time and many people were burned and drowned. The army then retreated, still protecting the Confederate army. "I'm going to catch up with others." It describes the battlefield situation of fire attack in detail.
In recent years, a new viewpoint has been widely spread. Some scholars believe that the main reason for Cao Jun's defeat in Chibi is epidemic disease.
Reflection? Shu Wei? There is a record in the "Ji of Emperor Wu": "The public went to Jiangling to send Zhang to Baqiu to save Hefei. Wenquan □ arrived and left. Going to Chibi is not conducive to preparing for war. So there was a great epidemic, many officials died, and they led the troops back. " There are Jingzhou and Jiangnan County. Never mentioned fire attack, only wrote that the plague prevailed in the army, and the officers and men suffered heavy losses and had to retreat.
Chibi ancient battlefield
Reflection? Wu Shu? There is a record in the Biography of Wu Zhu: "Yu and Pu are the left and right governors, each with 10,000 people, and they are well prepared. When they met in Chibi, they defeated Cao Gongjun. " The public burned the rest of the ships and then retreated. The soldiers were hungry and most of them died. "Similarly, there is no mention of Zhou Yu's fire attack, only that Cao Jun died of epidemic disease, and Cao Cao burned the rest of the warships and retreated to the north.
The official history written by Chen Shou? There are two different descriptions of "Battle of Red Cliffs" in the History of the Three Kingdoms for whatever reason, which makes the reason for Cao Jun's failure inconclusive, but the theory of "epidemic disease" still has its scientific side.
Cao Jun's main force is mostly the Central Plains Army, mainly the Ma Army and the Bu Army, with a number of about150,000. These troops who follow Cao Cao should be the elite troops in Cao Jun, while Sun Liu's joint army has only 50,000 to 60,000 people. The confrontation with the allies on the river is mainly the 70,000-80,000 Jingzhou water army that just joined Cao Cao.
"Battle of Red Cliffs" is only a local war after the contact between the two armies. The burning of the warship Cao Jun was not enough to shake Cao Jun's fighting capacity on the shore. They are fully capable of keeping calm and even fighting back in the land war. The main reason for the collapse of the army should be the outbreak of epidemic disease. Cao Jun's acclimatization led to the epidemic of plague, and a large number of soldiers died, which made the troops lose their combat effectiveness, so that "(Cao) burned all the remaining ships and retired."
As for the specific disease of this plague (probably schistosomiasis), there should be no way to identify it after nearly two thousand years.