The Battle of Red Cliff
赤壁之戰" (Chìbì zhī zhàn)
Cao Cao had two main rivals: Liu Bei (劉備 - Liú Bèi) in the south, and Sun Quan (孫權 - Sūn Quán) in the east. Liu Bei had just gotten his butt kicked by Cao Cao, and his army was down to twenty thousand men. Cao Cao was moving fast and hoping to reunite China in one fell swoop. Liu Bei knew he couldn’t stand a chance against Cao Cao’s 500,000-strong army, so he sent his genius strategist and negotiator, Zhuge Liang, over to Sun Quan to convince him to form an alliance against Cao Cao.
At first, this tactic didn’t go so well. You see, Cao Cao had sent Sun Quan a letter stating that he had 800,000 troops (not sure if that was just a boast or not) and that Sun had better surrender. Sun’s own advisors were urging him to make peace with Cao, and it seemed like Zhuge Liang would fail in his quest. But Sun Quan was a stubborn man, and he wanted to fight. One day, his advisors met in his great hall and again urged him to make peace with Cao Cao. Sun Quan suddenly stood up, took out his sword, and chopped a corner off of the table in front of him. He said, “Any man who doesn’t want to fight will have the same fate as this table.” And with that, the alliance was on.
Even allied together, Liu and Sun’s forces amounted to only about 50,000, a tiny sum compared to what Cao Cao had. But Sun had a massive fleet on the Yangtze River, and his troops were well trained to fight on water. Cao Cao’s troops were not. So the allies decided to meet Cao Cao at Red Cliffs, a spot where the river was over a mile wide.
Badly outnumbered, the allies had to use every trick in the book to survive this battle.
The first hurdle they ran into was when the allies realized that they were way short on arrows, and they wouldn’t have time to manufacture new ones. So Zhuge Liang built a bunch of dummy boats filled with strawman soldiers and with straw roofs. He sent them swiftly across the river at Cao Cao’s forces. Cao Cao thought it was a surprise attack and ordered his archers to shoot down all the troops before they could get to his boats. He peppered the boats with arrows until they finally stopped and retreated back to the allied shore. Cao Cao thought he won a victory, but really, it was just a ploy, as the dummy boats came back, and the allies now had 100,000 extra arrows. To this day, Chinese people use the idiom 草船借箭 (cǎochuánjièjiàn) to describe Zhuge Liang’s genius move.
The second problem is that Cao Cao had a spy high up in the allied camp, so all of their military plans were getting to him. One day they figured out who the spy was and they decided to use him to their advantage. They left a fake letter in the commander’s office for the spy to run into when he was snooping around. The letter showed that Cao Cao’s top admirals were actually spies for the allies! The spy reported to Cao Cao, who had his admirals killed at once. But those admirals weren’t actually spies, and now Cao Cao had to go into a naval battle without naval officers.
Cao Cao was having trouble training his ground troops to go on water because they kept getting seasick and now he didn’t have the people to train them. So he decided to tie all of his boats together to keep them steady. But this played right into the hands of the allies, who had their greatest trick in store.
The allies prepared a bunch of bomb boats, which were heavily armored boats filled with gunpowder. Then they waited for the right moment. And that’s what the allies needed. They waited and waited until finally a stiff breeze came up from the east. Then they attacked, ramming their bomb boats into Cao Cao’s boats. They burst into flames and the wind from the east started spreading the fire across the other boats. And because Cao Cao’s boats were all tied together, no one could escape, and thousands and thousands of Cao Cao’s troops died. Then the allies launched a small army on the other side of the river and did a flank attack against Cao Cao’s ground troops. With the shock of his naval defeat, Cao Cao was totally unprepared for the flank attack, and he had to retreat.
50,000 defeating 500,000. It was one of the biggest upsets in military history. The allies started chasing after Cao Cao’s army and almost destroyed it, but he just got away, and soon the allies started bickering among themselves over resources. Liu Bei and Sun Quan split up and formed their own states, and the Three Kingdoms were formed.
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