General Chen Tie's feud with Chiang Kai-shek

Chen Tie was born in Huangpu and eventually revolted. His feud with Jiang is worth playing.

On November 21, 1949, Chen Tie, deputy director of the Guizhou Appeasement Office, and eight Kuomintang generals announced an uprising in Zunyi. When the news came out, it was undoubtedly a slap in the face to those military and political personnel of the National Government who were still waiting, forcing them to make a quick choice. On December 9, Lu Han and Long Yun of Kunming, Yunnan Province, and Liu Wenhui, Deng Xihou, and Pan Wenhua of Peng County, Sichuan, revolted one after another, and the Chinese People's Liberation Army entered the southwest and successfully took over the Kuomintang regime. Chen Tie, a famous anti-Japanese general born in Huangpu, who was a senior general of the Kuomintang Fifth and Sixth Army and the deputy commander-in-chief of the Northeast "Suppression General", why did he break with his teacher Chiang Kai-shek when the Kuomintang government fell? The reason for this is very tortuous and interesting.

Entered the Central Division, Xin Kou appeared heroic

In August 1934, Xie Bin, commander of the Kuomintang 85th Division, was killed while encircling and suppressing the Red Army in western Hubei. There was no master in the army, the people's hearts were floating, and they were worried that the Gui clan would take advantage of the gap and take it for themselves, so Chiang Kai-shek urgently ordered the military command to transfer Chen Tie, deputy commander of the 83rd Division, to take over the division commander.

Why was Chen Tie transferred to this unit, which was mainly composed of Guizhou people? The reason is very simple: one is that Chen Tie is a Zunyi man in Guizhou and can be accepted by the Soldiers of Guizhou; the other is that Chen Tie was a student of the first phase of the Whampoa Military Academy, participated in the Eastern Expedition and the Northern Expedition, and fought against the "People's Revolutionary Government of the Republic of China" in Fujian, which was deeply appreciated and trusted by Chiang Kai-shek.

However, Chen Tie's path to succession was not easy, and the biggest obstacle came from Liu Zhuming, chief of staff of the Eighty-fifth Division, who coveted the position of division commander. When the news of Xie Bin's death came out, Liu Zhuming, who was studying in the higher education class of Nanjing Army University, came to mind. He went to see He Yingqin, minister of military affairs, and falsely claimed that "the deputy division commander (Chen Hongyuan) was missing and asked to return to the division to handle the aftermath." After receiving He's approval, he went to the Wuhan camp commander He Chengmao to get a letter of appointment as acting division commander, and quickly rushed to the Eighty-fifth Division to seize power. After Liu Zhuming arrived at the army, he immediately launched conspiratorial activities and adopted methods of inducement and deception, with the intention of uniting regimental and battalion-level cadres and refusing Chen Tie's appointment.

Chen Tie is also not the oil of the provincial lamp, and he has his own way to deal with this kind of villain. In response, he reported liu zhuming's deeds to Chiang Kai-shek on the one hand, and asked chen hongyuan, deputy division commander, to return to the army to work together. In this regard, Liu Zhuming underestimated the energy of his opponent, and he actually threatened Chen Tiedao in person: "The bed we have made, no one can sleep!" Seeing that the other side was not afraid, he gathered his troops to demonstrate, and even threatened: "Chen Tie wants to be the commander of the division, so he drags the troops to the Gui clan." ”

Chen Tie was well aware that Liu Zhuming was scheming, fierce and vicious, and did everything in his power for the sake of profit. In order to foil the other side's conspiracy, Chen Tie inspected the garrison, communicated with the officers and men, and immediately took the troops to Wanxian, Sichuan, for reorganization after winning the support of Acting Chief of Staff Mao Mengxian and most of the lower-ranking officers. Liu Zhuming was extremely angry about this and still planned to pull the troops away. Chen Tie saw that he did not repent, so he drew his salary from the bottom of the cauldron and swept away his cronies and battalion-level cadres. Liu Zhuming was still not dead-hearted, and wanted to fight the trapped beasts. At this time, Sun Yuanliang, the commander of the Eighty-seventh Division, suddenly appeared in front of him on the orders of Chiang Kai-shek, arrested him, who did not understand the situation, and then escorted him to Yichang and handed him over to a military court for trial.

After Chen Tie took up his new post, he carried out a major change of blood for the cadres of the troops and established a force with the sons of Guizhou as the main body and the graduates of the Whampoa Military Academy as the leaders at all levels. In order to adapt the Eighty-fifth Division to modern warfare, he set up a non-commissioned training team and specially hired German adviser Welke to conduct strict military education; in order to reverse the negative impact caused by Liu Zhuming to the troops, Chen Tie straightened out military discipline and established personal prestige. After receiving the new equipment allocated by the central government, the Eighty-fifth Division was highly morale and a new look, becoming one of the twenty integrated divisions at that time.

After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the 85th Division set out from bengbu and went north to resist the Japanese. Before boarding the train at the Cangzhou Railway Station in Hebei Province, Chen Tie concentrated on the training words of officers and men and passionately pointed out: At the crucial moment of the chinese nation's life and death, resisting foreign insults and defending the country is the sacred mission of every Chinese. When talking about slaughtering and killing, committing adultery and plundering, and committing no evil deeds wherever the Japanese Kou went, Chen Tie asked in a loud voice, "Who has no parents and children?" Who has no siblings? Who is not born and raised by their parents? The compatriots in the occupied areas have their own relatives just like us, and if we do not kill the enemy and expel the Wokou, then the unfortunate encounter of the compatriots in the occupied areas today will be our turn tomorrow. Chen Tie's words infected all the officers and men of the division. The hearers were filled with righteous indignation and shared hatred for the enemy. With an order, the Eighty-fifth Division, with the feeling of defending the country, boarded the train going north...

When Chen Tie and his troops arrived at Baoji, Zhangjiakou had been lost, and the southern mouth of the Great Wall was also attacked. At this time, the commander of the Fourteenth Army, Li Mo'an, fearing that the Japanese army would cut off the rear road, after leaving a regiment to defend the Thousand Army Platform, led his troops to reinforce Tang Enbo's Thirteenth Army. When the Japanese army saw the Fourteenth Army falling into the nest, it took advantage of the void and stormed the Thousand Army Platform. The Eighty-fifth Division arrived in time, saw heavy casualties among the defenders, and responded to the battle in time. In a fierce counterattack, the Eighty-fifth Division inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy, forcing it to return in vain. The Eighty-fifth Division took advantage of the victory to pursue until it reached the southern mouth of the Great Wall to grasp the area around the Tongue Mountain, and after a fierce battle with the enemy, it was ordered to move to Shanxi.

On October 10, 1937, the Battle of Xinkou was in full swing. The Japanese Fifth Division, led by Itagaki Seishiro, stormed Xinkou. In the face of repeated bombardment by Japanese planes, artillery bombardment by ground troops, and the release of poison gas, chen tie and deputy division commander Chen Hongyuan led their troops to fight bloodily in the face of the enemy on the side of the main position, and finally recaptured the southern Huaihua position. Subsequently, the Japanese attacked several times, but were thwarted by the Eighty-fifth Division.

The Guizhou Grass Shoe Soldier describes Chen Tie's performance at the Battle of Xinkou as follows:

In order not to let the enemy succeed, Chen Tie held his position during the day, and at night managed to approach the stubborn enemy through the blockade line to successfully sneak in, severely damaged the banyuan division of the enemy's ace army, and engaged in a tug-of-war with the enemy, so that the position was regained and lost, and the loss was regained, and the casualties on both sides were heavy. The Eighty-fifth Division lost two-thirds of its strength. At a critical juncture, Chen Tie formed a death squad of the headquarters's miscellaneous personnel (including heavy personnel and sick numbers), with Chen Gangbai as the battalion commander, and Chen Tie personally commanded, working together to kill the enemy courageously..."

Later, when the commander of the Japanese North China Front, Terauchi Shouichi, inspected the Northern Jin Front, he learned that the position of the 85th Division was difficult to breach, so he found another way and ordered the 20th Division to attack Niangziguan, the gate of Shanxi. After the loss of Niangziguan, the Japanese army marched straight to Yuci and threatened Taiyuan. In order to avoid being attacked by the enemy in the abdomen and back, Chen Tie was ordered to abandon the Xinkou position that had been held for twenty-one days, and led his troops to move to southern Jin, southwestern Jin, and western Henan to carry out guerrilla warfare against the Japanese army. On May 15, 1938, Chen Tie was promoted to lieutenant general and succeeded Li Mo'an as the commander of the 14th Army.

Teachers and students are different, and the gap is a dead knot

Among the Huangpu warriors, Chen Tiesu was known for his decisiveness, bravery and good fighting. Due to his good performance in the early days of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Chen Tie was repeatedly appreciated and praised by Chiang Kai-shek.

However, Chiang Kai-shek was wary of the former Whampoa Military Academy students and regarded Chen Tie as an outsider. In Jiang's heart, there is always a dead knot that is constantly cut and chaotic, making it intertwined with love and hate, and it is difficult to let go. The reasons for this are nothing more than the following: First, Chen Tie is a native of Guizhou and is a fellow villager and old subordinate of He Yingqin. If He Yingqin's power grows, it is bound to threaten Chiang's position. Therefore, to stop the rise of the "Guizhou faction" is at stake for Chiang Kai-shek's survival. Second, Chen Tie was close to Wei Lihuang, who was not a "concubine" and had a "pro-communist" tendency, and was his nemesis. Influenced by this, Chen Tie passively resisted Chiang Kai-shek's established policy of "outside the country before going inside", and even opposed the use of force against the Eighth Route Army. What annoyed Jiang even more was that in 1938 Chen Tie successively met with Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, Wang Ming, Liu Shaoqi, and other CPC leaders in Yuanqu, Xi'an, and Shichi, and was invited to visit the Eighth Route Army's garrison many times, and also provided convenience for the Eighth Route Army in his own defense zone.

For the above reasons, Chiang Kai-shek has always guarded against and rejected Chen Tie and will not reuse it. Chen Tie also had a lot of criticism of his teacher's suppression, believing that Chiang regarded the army as private property, formed parties for personal gain, excluded dissidents, and lacked the selfless embrace of the leader and grand duke. When Li Mo'an was promoted to commander of the Thirty-third Army, Chen Tie felt that Chiang Kai-shek was too eccentric and unfair to his classmates who were also from the Huangpu department, so he felt a sense of estrangement. For future purposes, he once had the idea of joining the Communist Party.

Chen Tie's knot in this period can be corroborated by his cousin, Mr. Yao Shida, in his article "From Kuomintang General to Vice Governor of New China":

In the autumn of 1939, he (Chen Tie) returned home for the first time after eighteen years of leaving home. By this time he had been promoted to commander of the Fourteenth Army, forty years old, twenty-one years older than me. His first impression on me was that he was steady, reticent, resolute, and unincorporated as an officer. At that time, I was teaching at the Old Town Primary School in Zunyi City, and I worked with some progressive teachers successively, and under the influence of the theory of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China and the Anti-Japanese Resistance, I wanted to go out. During the conversation, I said: 'I want to go to Chengdu to take the military school, but my family can't afford to read literature.' He said, 'Now you have to have a political mind in the military.' What's so bad about being an elementary school teacher all your life? This time, a villager asked me to take his little one out to find a job, and I advocated that he might as well go into Yan'an to resist the university. ’”

In this article, Mr. Yao Shida also talked about some little-known things about Chen Tie's opposition to Chiang Kai-shek, such as Chen Tie saying many times:

"When I went to Huangpu, I was indeed full of enthusiasm and devoted myself to following Mr. Sun (Zhongshan). During the Northern Expedition, we Huangpu students really gave up our lives and forgot to die. When I became the battalion commander, I followed Wei Lihuang. Xu Chongzhi of the Cantonese Army was his old cousin, and at that time he was the commander of the Ninth Regiment of He Yingqin's First Army, and Jiang did not trust him. In the sixteenth year of the Republic of China (1927), Chiang Kai-shek stepped down for the first time, and after he came to power, he only gave Wei Lihuang, who tried his best to support him, a deputy commander of the garrison who had no real power. At Luda, Wei repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with Jiang. In the autumn of the twenty-first year of the Republic of China, Wei Feng led the Fourteenth Army to participate in the settlement of the Fujian problem, and as a result, the provincial chairman and the director of appeasement were all others. Wei Tian complained bitterly, saying, 'The battle is for us to fight, and the officials will do it for others.' It's so unfair'. Wei was indeed a general, but not from Jiangsu and Zhejiang. I have always been a subordinate of Wei, and I am a native of Guizhou. During the eight years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, we were all with the Communist Party, and Chiang Kai-shek and He Yingqin had contradictions, so how could they believe me? Fate was predestined, only Tongwei Lao had floated and sunk in total. ”

Of course, Chiang Kai-shek would never tolerate the rebellious behavior of Wei Lihuang and Chen Tie, so he sent someone to collect evidence of their crimes of "communism." In early 1942, Yuan Xiaoxuan, director of the Eighth Route Army's office in Luoli, defected to the military command and confessed the secret contact between Wei Lihuang and Chen Tie and the CCP. Greatly angered, Chiang Kai-shek immediately placed Wei Lihuang under house arrest in Chongqing and removed him from his post as commander of the First Theater and chairman of Henan Province. Chen Tie resigned as commander and part-time commander of the Fourteenth Army in the spring of 1943 at the suggestion of his old commander, Jiang Dingwen, the former director of the Xi'an Battalion and commander of the Tenth Theater. While Chen Tie was in Xi'an, Chiang Kai-shek was still uneasy about him and instructed Hu Zongnan to send people to monitor his movements.

In 1944, Chen Tie's father died of illness, and he returned to Zunyi after the funeral. During his stay, he served his old mother, talked to the villagers, lived a leisurely and peaceful life.

Liaoshen dragged his feet, and Zunyi raised the banner of righteousness

In January 1948, after Wei Lihuang was appointed deputy director of the Northeast Xingyuan and commander-in-chief of the Northeast "Suppression of Bandits", he repeatedly called Chen Tie and asked him to be the deputy commander-in-chief. Chen Tie knew that this act was more sinister and less auspicious, but in order to take care of friendship, he had to admit it with a hard scalp. Before leaving Zunyi, Chen Tie said to his cousins Yao Shida and Zhao Licheng: "This time when I went to the northeast, I put up a fire pit thing, that is, I couldn't support the love of Boss Wei. In fact, by the time I arrived in Shenyang, his old man would have been taken prisoner. Chen Tie was on his way to the northeast and stayed in Shanghai. During this period, he had contacts with the underground party of the Communist Party. In June of the same year, he moved to the northeast to take up his new post.

As Chen Tie expected, on December 2 of that year, the People's Liberation Army lianke Shenyang, Yingkou, Wei Lihuang and Chen Tie fled from the Huludao command post via Tianjin to Nanjing. Subsequently, Chen Tie took the road to Liling to return to Zunyi.

In the three major battles of Liaoshen, Pingjin, and Huaihai, the Kuomintang army suffered a devastating blow, and as the People's Liberation Army captured Nanjing, the domestic political, military, and economic situation deteriorated day by day, Chen Tie understood that the rule of the Nationalist government was about to become history, so he instructed Yao Shida: "The last time I went to Shanghai, I made contact with the underground party of the COMMUNIST Party. In the future, the matter of correspondence will be left to you. Can't you write several fonts? Now the post office inspection is very strict. I was watched. When talking about the Liaoshen Campaign, Chen Tie excitedly told Yao Shida: "That return to Jinzhou is tight, Gu Zhutong and Chiang Kai-shek repeatedly urged him (Wei Lihuang) to send reinforcements, he just did not come out, find some reason to push." In front of Han Quanhua (Wei's wife), he also told me to signal Liao Yaoxiang's generals to also rise up against the troops. So Chiang Kai-shek was furious and pointed at me and said, 'Jinzhou has fallen, kill your head!' Mr. Wei said to me privately: 'As soon as Jinzhou is liberated, Boss Jiang will be finished!' To drag him down, we can only breathe this breath. ’”

In the spring of 1949, Acting President Li Zongren appointed Chen Tie as the commander of the Eighth Formation Training Command, recruiting troops in Guizhou in an attempt to compete with the People's Liberation Army. Chen Tie was dumbfounded by this appointment and sighed, "I said that I have reached the (liberated) kankan, so what are you doing with all this?!" ”

Gu Zhenglun, the chairman of Guizhou Province, was very unhappy with Chen Tie's appointment, believing that Li Zongren was extremely distrustful of him, so he moved up and down, making ghosts everywhere, and finally forcing the Nationalist government to take back his life. In order to appease Chen Tie, the Nationalist government reappointed him as deputy director of the Guizhou Appeasement Office.

In early November of the same year, the people's liberation army forward arrived in Zhenyuan, and the whole province of Guizhou was shaken. While the party and government organs in Zunyi were busy with contingency measures, Chen Tie suddenly summoned Yao Shida and asked him to quickly inform Chen Futong, a progressive person: According to insider reports, Zunyi Commissioner Lu Jie knew that Chen Futong was in contact with the underground communist party and was preparing to hunt him down.

On November 14, Guiyang was liberated, and the danger of Zunyi was imminent. Under the mediation of Chen Futong, Chen Tie got in touch with Yang Tianyuan, the liaison officer of the Second Field Army, secretary of the zunyi underground party county party committee of the CPC. Under the arrangements of Chen Futong and Yang Tianyuan, Chen Tie and six Kuomintang generals met and held talks with Chen Puru, secretary of the Zunyi Prefectural CPC Committee, political commissar of the Military Sub-district, and director of the Zunyi Military Control Commission, and decided the future and destiny of Zunyi.

According to mr. Chen Futong, an "old man of Guizhou culture," in his article "The Eight Generals of the Kuomintang Who Surrendered To the Light Without War," on the evening of 20 July, in the living room of Guo Huicang, commander of the Kuomintang division in Shuidong Street, the old city of Zunyi, Chen Puru held talks with seven Kuomintang generals, Chen Tie, Wu Jianping, Bai Huizhang, He Zhizhong, Jiang Zaizhen, and Chen Deming. In addition to General Zhu Zhenmin, who was unable to attend the meeting, the meeting was also held by Zhang Zhaokui, a famous brother in Zunyi, and Shi Zhaozhou, chairman of the Fenggang County Senate. Chen Puru was Chinese New Year's Eve two years old and had no arrogance, "he calmly and skillfully talked to them and relieved them of unnecessary doubts."

The next day, Generals Chen Tie and Wu Jianping responded to the "Notice of the Chinese People's Liberation Army" and the "Eight Chapters of the Law" and declared an uprising. Subsequently, the People's Liberation Army did not waste a single shot, did not lose a soldier and a general, and entered the historic city of Zunyi.

In New China, Chen Tie successively served as a member of the Southwest Administrative Committee, vice chairman of the First to Third CPPCC Committee of Guizhou Province, vice governor, member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, and member of the National Defense Commission.

Source: Wenshi Tiandi Author: 厐思淳