Conquest of Wei and Battle of Jingxing
HAN XIN GATHERED AN ARMY AND MARCHED to his emperor’s rescue, driving back Chu forces sufficiently for the Han army to dig in at Xingyang. In the face of this turn of fortune, all of Han’s recent allies hastened to swear loyalty to Xiang Yu. In Xingyang, the king of Wei asked permission to travel home to take care of his ailing parents. Once there, he courted Chu support. Liu Bang sent an ambassador on a futile mission to negotiate. Then, feeling himself strong enough in Xingyang, he detached Han Xin with an army of unknown size to recover Wei.
Bao, the king of Wei, prepared for such an eventuality. He fortified the Yellow River crossing at Pu-fan and stationed a force at Linjin (Lin-chin) to block a river crossing. When Han Xin arrived in the autumn of 205 BC, he proceeded to follow Sun Tzu’s cardinal rule: all warfare is based on deception. Han Xin gave the impression of establishing a large camp by displaying many banners and gathering a large number of boats to launch an amphibious assault. As this was happening, he secretly led the bulk of his army several miles northward to the town of Xiayang. There, they constructed a fleet of pontoon crafts (reportedly made of wooden planks lashed to earthenware jugs)12 and crossed the river. With the Wei forces still facing the diversionary force at Linjin, Han Xin marched his forces far to the east and attacked the Wei capital city at Anyi (Yuncheng). Learning of this flanking movement, King Bao marched his army away from the river back to Anyi. He was defeated outside the city and captured, after which he once again swore allegiance to Liu Bang. At this point, Han Xin’s plan was to march north to Dai, then east through Zhao, which would put him in a position to strike Xiang Yu’s army from the rear.
Han Xin proceeded northeast to confront the king of Dai; along the way Liu Bang sent him some reinforcements under Zhang Er. When he was dividing up the realm in 206 BC, Xiang Yu had named Zhang Er king of Changshan inside the kingdom of Zhao, alongside Chen Yu. Chen Yu, jealous of his supporting role, overthrew Zhang Er and reinstated the previous king of Zhao. In gratitude, the king named Chen Yu king of Dai. Chen Yu appointed a subordinate, Xia Yue, to act as regent while he stayed in Zhao. Thus, Zhang Er proved to be a valuable asset to Han Xin, for Zhang had both a knowledge of their opponents and a desire for vengeance. In the autumn of 205 BC, Han Xin and Zhang Er defeated Dai forces at Yanyu and captured Regent Xia Yue. Meanwhile, Xiang Yu had been exerting pressure against the Han position at Xingyang, so Liu Bang ordered most of Han Xin’s best troops to reinforce his position, leaving Han Xin and Zhang Er with some 30,000 less-experienced soldiers. Still, they continued their march to confront the next enemy, the forces of Zhao.
Han Xin’s troops marched through mountain passes until they reached Jingxing (the Jing gorge) sometime late in 205 BC. They entered this extremely narrow pass heading eastward; at the far end waited 200,000 Zhao troops in a fortified encampment. They were under the command of Chen Yu, the lord of Cheng’an, whose second-in-command was Li Zuoche, lord of Guangwu. Li Zuoche advised Chen Yu to send him with 30,000 men around to cut off the lines of communication, bottle the Han forces up in the pass, and starve them out. Meeting them on open ground would not be wise: “An army such as his, riding the crest of victory and fighting far from home, cannot be opposed.” If contained in the gorge, however, the Han army would be unable to live off the land and too far from a supply base to last very long; “before ten days are out I will bring the heads of their two commanders and lay them beneath your banners!” Li Zuoche promised his general. “I beg you to give heed to my plan, for, if you do not, you will most certainly find yourself their prisoner.”13
Chen Yu, a strict Confucianist, disagreed. To send forces around Han Xin’s rear would not be something an honest follower of Confucius would do. Besides, he thought the number of Han troops was closer to 3,000 or 4,000 rather than the reported 20,000 to 30,000; if he did not directly confront a force he greatly outnumbered, none of his subordinates would respect him: “The other nobles would call me coward and think nothing of coming to attack me!”14
Han Xin sent spies ahead to learn what the Zhao forces intended, and they discovered Li’s advice and Chen’s rejection of it. This, coupled with advice from Zhang Er concerning Chen Yu’s nature, motivated Han Xin to proceed. Having taken the measure of his opponent, Han Xin continued his march into the gorge. Some ten miles from the mouth, he encamped. That evening he sent 2,000 light cavalry, each man carrying a red Han banner, into the mountains to circle around behind the Zhao camp. Their orders were to stay hidden in the hills until they saw the Zhao camp abandoned. He also sent out a 10,000-man vanguard to deploy opposite the Zhao camp with orders to dig in with their backs to the river. This foolish deployment sent the Zhao army into peals of laughter.
At dawn the next morning, having given his men a light meal, Han Xin confided to his subordinates that they would be dining in the Zhao fort that night. None believed him, but they followed his orders nonetheless. Han Xin led the remainder of his army to the front of his vanguard, deploying with his banners and drums, the signs of his command. At that, Chen Yu sent his first wave into battle. Han Xin’s men fought hard but gradually withdrew into the main body, abandoning their banners and drums. As Han Xin had foreseen, that brought the rest of the Zhao army out of their camp, eager to take part in the rout. Still, the Han forces fought so desperately they could not be destroyed. As the battle raged, the light cavalry force, hidden in the hills, emerged and entered the Zhao fort, killing the few remaining defenders. They then proceeded to take down all Zhao flags and replace them with Han banners. In the face of Han Xin’s desperate fighting, Chen Yu ordered his men to withdraw and regroup for another attack. His men, now seeing the Han banners in their own camp, became panic stricken. They assumed their commanders were now dead or captured, so their morale collapsed and they began to flee. Although their commanders beheaded a few to halt the retreat, this act was fruitless.15 As the Zhao army began to break, Han Xin ordered the attack, routing the enemy and killing Chen Yu. Chen’s advisor Li Zuoche was taken captive and brought before Han Xin, who ordered him unbound and treated with utmost respect. He proceeded to question Li on the best strategy to pursue, now that Chen Yu was dead and the king of Zhao was in captivity.
That evening, as they were dining in the Zhao camp as he had predicted, Han Xin’s subordinates questioned his tactics. After all, they pointed out to him, Sun Tzu’s directives called for a river to be on the flank or in front, not to the rear. Han Xin replied, “Does not the book say, ‘Put them at a fatal position and they will survive?’ Besides, I did not have the chance to get acquainted with the troops at my disposal.… Therefore, I was compelled to plunge them into a desperate position where everyone would have to fight for his own life. If I had provided them with a route of escape, they would all have run away.”16
Han Xin’s movement to contact was an approach march, since his spies had given him exact details of the Zhao position. He had launched a deliberate attack that had some of the aspects of a feint. The main difference was that the bulk of his force was the feint and his small light cavalry force proved to be the decisive attack; at the same time, the use of flags in the Zhao fort to give the impression of a larger force was a feint in itself, followed by a counterattack from the main body. The key to the entire battle was audacity. Few battles in history better define the word: Han Xin risked more than 20,000 men in a position with no retreat in order to lure a massively larger force out of its position and then depended on a deception in the enemy rear to break their morale.
Battle of the Wei River
LIU BANG AND XIANG YU HAD SPENT months in 204 BC facing each other in the area east of Luoyang, between the Yellow River and the upper reaches of the Huai River, blocking each other’s path toward the other’s territory.17 Cities were won and lost, with Xingyang and Changgao as the two major points of contention. Liu Bang was able to leave the combat area periodically to recruit forces in the area around Chang’an. In the summer of 204 BC, one of his advisors suggested
that he not return directly to the battlefields but march south and recruit even more forces with the aid of Qing Bu, king of Linjiang, and then station their forces in the city of Yuan. This activity drew Xiang Yu southward, away from the Luoyang region, in hopes of catching Liu Bang in the open, but the Han king and his new army stayed within Yuan’s walls. Peng Yue, king of Liang, meanwhile harried Chu forces in the east. When Xiang Yu turned to chastise Peng Yue, Liu Bang led his army to reinforce Changgao. Once done driving off Peng Yue, Xiang Yu returned to confront Liu Bang and quickly captured both Xingyang and Changgao, but not before Liu Bang made a hasty escape. This was sometime in the early autumn of 204 BC. He fled north across the Yellow River to Xiuwu, where Han Xin and Zhang Er were camped.
Liu Bang awarded Zhang Er military command over Zhao and sent Han Xin to attack eastward into Qi. He meanwhile fortified his position at Xiuwu and sent some cavalry to reinforce Peng Yue, who was once again harassing Chu supply lines. As Han Xin was marching toward the Pingyuan Ford across the Yellow River into Qi, Liu Bang sent an ambassador, Li Yiji, to negotiate an accord with Tian Guang, king of Qi. He succeeded in this mission: “As a result, Tian Guang revolted against Chu and joined in alliance with Han, agreeing to participate in an attack on Xiang Yu.”18 While on the march Han Xin learned of this new alliance, but continued onward. After all, he had not received royal orders to stop the invasion. Trusting to his new alliance, Tian Guang dispersed his armies and continued to entertain Li Yiji. Han Xin therefore had no trouble capturing Lixia and marching on the Qi capital of Linxi. Before making his escape, Tian Guang boiled Li Yiji alive for supposedly deceiving him. Tian Guang fled and sent a request for aid to Xiang Yu, who “accordingly sent Long Ju to go and smite him [Han Xin].”19 Long Ju’s army of 200,000, together with those rallied by Tian Guang, marched to intercept Han Xin’s army. The two forces met each other on opposite sides of the Wei River, probably at the end of 204 BC.
Once again, Han Xin’s opponent underestimated him. One of Long Ju’s subordinates advised him to dig in and postpone battle; once the people of Qi learned that their king was still alive they would rally around him and the Han army would be isolated in hostile territory. Long Ju scoffed at the notion of avoiding a fight: “I have always felt Han Hsin to be inconsequential. He relied on a washer woman for food, so he never had any plans to support himself; he was insulted by having to crawl between a man’s legs, so he lacks the courage to confront people. He is not worth worrying about.”20
When night fell, Han Xin sent a number of his men upriver with orders to fill 10,000 sandbags and dam the river. This done, the river fell considerably but continued to run. The next morning Han Xin led his 70,000 soldiers across the river to assault Long Ju’s army. After some indecisive combat, Han Xin withdrew his army back across the river. Long Ju, “truly elated, exclaimed: ‘I knew Han Hsin was a coward!’ Thereupon he ordered his army to ford the river and pursue Han Hsin’s forces.”21 Seeing this, Han Xin gave the signal for the sandbag dam to be opened, and the rush of water drowned a large portion of the Chu troops. Long Ju was left with only a handful of men across the river, pinned against it by the now superior Han force. As the remainder of his army watched from across the river, Long Ju was killed. Tian Guang of Qi fled and was finally chased to ground and captured at Che’ng-yang. Han Xin proceeded to pacify the remainder of Qi.
While Han Xin did engage in an approach march for his movement to contact, it is unclear whether he chose the battleground. Many of the details around the battle are unrecorded. He engaged in a deliberate attack, followed by a deceptive withdrawal, using his knowledge of Long Ju’s prejudice. Although Long Ju should have noticed and investigated the radical difference in river level, Han Xin’s interruption of the flow was a complete surprise. With his entire force on his own side of the river and Long Ju’s force now both weakened and divided, Han Xin was easily able to concentrate his army for the purpose of Long Ju’s destruction. The exploitation of the trapped army was complete, although the remainder across the river fled without pursuit. Only Tian Guang was chased; with him captured rather than killed another Qi uprising was probably averted.
Over the next several months Han Xin was named king of Qi and spent his time consolidating the province. Liu Bang seemed to be growing wary of Han Xin’s potential political ambitions, but Han Xin proved his loyalty by rejecting an offer from one of Xiang Yu’s emissaries. One of his own advisors, seeing how powerful and talented Han Xin was, advised him to support neither Han nor Chu, but to establish himself as a third power and propose a three-way rule; thus, no one power would be able to overcome the other two: “if you choose to follow Chu, the men of Chu would never trust you, and should you choose to follow Han, the men of Han would quake with fear. With gifts such as these, whom should you follow?”22 Even after extended arguments along these lines, Han Xin refused to abandon his fealty to Liu Bang.
Meanwhile, Xiang Yu alternated between fighting Liu Bang’s forces near the Yellow River and securing his lines of communication from Peng Yue’s harassment. He finally proposed to Liu Bang that they split China between them, an offer he had rejected when Liu Bang suggested it after his defeat at Pengcheng. Liu Bang accepted the offer, but as Xiang Yu was withdrawing back to Chu, the Han forces followed. Liu Bang called all his generals to meet him at Guling, but Han Xin and Peng Yue did not arrive. Thus, Liu Bang was forced to retreat once again to his defenses. After promises of increased land rewards for his generals (including Han Xin), Liu Bang’s generals gathered together for a final battle against the Chu forces at Gaixia (modern Beng-bu). This time the Han forces were overwhelming: Han Xin commanded 300,000 in the center, with forces on each flank and two more in reserve. Xiang Yu’s army numbered but 100,000. “Han Xin advanced and joined in combat but, failing to gain the advantage, retired and allowed General Kong and General Bi to close in from the sides,” Sima Qian relates. “When the Chu forces began to falter, Han Xin took advantage of their weakness to inflict a great defeat.”23
A handful of troops apparently remained under Xiang Yu’s command after the battle, but were soon surrounded by Han Xin’s force. Han Xin had his men sing local Chu folk songs, “so King Xiang said in great astonishment: ‘Has Han already got the whole of Chu? How many men of Chu there are!”24 Thus was Xiang Yu deceived into believing the worst about his position. He fled with a handful of cavalry and made a last stand against pursuing Han cavalry, inflicting considerable casualties, before fleeing alone. Given an opportunity to escape across the River Wu, he chose instead to face his pursuers one last time, reportedly killing several hundred Han soldiers and receiving ten wounds himself. He then committed suicide.25
Han Xin’s Generalship
BEING OUTNUMBERED IN EVERY BATTLE EXCEPT GAIXIA, Han Xin had to be a master of the principle of economy of force first and foremost. At the outflanking movement against the king of Wei, he depended on a small force appearing to be a much larger one preparing to cross the Yellow River at Linjin. Using a holding force outnumbered ten to one at the Jingxing pass allowed his strike force of 2,000 cavalry to initiate the deception in the enemy fortifications, breaking the enemy’s will. Both of these operations employed sufficient manpower to hold the enemy in place while a flanking force delivered the main blow, whether physically against the king of Wei’s army or psychologically at Jingxing.
For Han Xin, the two principles of maneuver and surprise were effectively inseparable. Sun Tzu’s dictum concerning deception dominated all his tactics. Though the sources mention the siege of Chaoge only in passing, they describe the victory as based on the tactic of the feigned retreat. The Yellow River crossing into Wei was a classic example of “hold ’em by the nose and kick ’em in the pants” in which Han Xin used his smaller wing to pin down a superior enemy, then crossed with his larger wing upriver and swung around the enemy rear.
At Jingxing and the Wei River, Han Xin also demonstrated a characteristic that marks the truly great tacticians: knowing when to break the rules. If
one can depend on his opponent to know the same rules, one can predict his actions and take advantage. After Jingxing, Han Xin’s generals questioned his decision to place his men with a river at their back. Sun Tzu advises not to “array your forces near the river to confront the invader but look for tenable ground and occupy the heights.”26 The Zhao soldiers all knew that dictum, hence their breaking out in laughter as Han Xin’s forces deployed. His response: Sun Tzu also says to put men in an untenable position and they will fight like cornered animals since there is no escape.
At the Wei River Han Xin also broke Sun Tzu’s rules about river crossings. “After crossing rivers you must distance yourself from them. If the enemy is fording a river to advance, do not confront them in the water. When half their forces have crossed, it will be advantageous to strike them.… Do not confront the current’s flow.”27 By blocking the river with sandbags, Han Xin did more than “confront” the current’s flow. He employed the feigned retreat tactic again, and followed the dictum of striking when half the enemy had crossed the river. In all his battles, Han Xin engaged in at least one maneuver that his enemy never suspected. Only at Gaixia did the battle seem to be a fairly straightforward affair: attack with the center, withdraw, strike with the flank units. Whether he accomplished a double envelopment is not recorded, but that is the maneuver to do so.
The key to Han Xin’s victories, however, lay in his manipulation of the principle of morale. Unlike Alexander, Han Xin depended not so much on maintaining his own army’s morale as in breaking that of the enemy. Because Han Xin seems rarely to have been in command of men who stayed with him for a long period, he could depend only on his reputation to retain his troops’ loyalty and keep their morale up. That didn’t always work, as shown before the battle at Jingxing when he promised his men they would dine in the Zhao encampment that night. “None of his generals believed that the plan would work,” Sima Qian writes, “but they feigned agreement and answered, ‘Very well.’”28 When Han Xin’s light cavalry force struck from behind and planted Han flags throughout the Zhao camp, however, the vastly more numerous Zhao army lost heart and fled.
Masters of the Battlefield Page 7