In the autumn of 1946, Chiang Kai-shek mobilized heavy troops to deal a heavy blow to the Shandong Field Army and the Central China Field Army in Lianghuai, and our military experience was summed up because Chen Yi's and Su Yu's troops were too dispersed and they failed to concentrate their superior forces to take various breakthroughs in the movement against the invading Kuomintang army.
After that, the CPC Central Committee decided to merge the Shandong Field Army and the Central China Field Army into the East China Field Army to cope with the increasingly large-scale situation in the East China Battlefield. Since then, Su Yu has continuously created a prelude to military myths in the East China Battlefield.
After the victory of the two Huaihuai, the Kuomintang army planned to take the opportunity to solve the PLA in east China, and successively deployed 23 integrated divisions, one after another in Huaiyin, one in central Jiangsu, and one in Lunan. Under the large-scale attack of the Kuomintang army, the East China Field Army was gradually defeated and retreated, the area of the liberated area was constantly decreasing, and the morale of the troops was very low.
Under such circumstances, Su Yu decided to teach the Kuomintang a lesson in Subei to reverse the situation on the battlefield, but the battle was not easy to fight. On the one hand, the East China Field Army had just been formed and did not understand some of Su Yu of the Shandong Field Army; on the other hand, it did not understand its opponents.
Su Yu once said that this was one of the most intense battles he had ever commanded, because Su Yu had a habit of fighting wars, that is, not to fight battles that had no chance to win, not to fight battles that he was not familiar with, and for the Battle of Subei, he really had no bottom.
After repeated consultations, it was finally decided to annihilate the Kuomintang troops who had attacked from Suqian to Shuyang and Xin'an. There were two main Kuomintang armies marching from Suqian to Shuyang, and Su Yu made two sets of combat plans at that time, one was to attack the left wing marching towards Xin'an Town at Wuhuading, and the other was to fight the right wing east of Suqian if the left wing was slow.
On December 13, 1945, the two armies of the Kuomintang marched in unison toward Shuyang, with the reorganized 69th Division on the left wing and the 11th Reorganized Division on the right wing, the 69th Division reaching Xiaodianzi, and the 11th Division reaching the Caojiaji and Gaoxu lines.
After constant review and reflection, Su Yu finally decided that this battle was mainly aimed at the entire 69th Division, because the entire 11th Division was Chen Cheng's 18th Army, which was the earliest, most powerful, and most famous veteran force of the Kuomintang army, and was known as the civil engineering department in the Kuomintang army.
At that time, the commander of the entire 11th Division, Hu Lian, the leader of the Huangpu Phase IV, was quite powerful, and according to Taiwanese historical materials, Mao Zedong was widely quoted as a handwritten letter to the front-line troops, in which he said: "Hu Lian of the Eighteenth Army is as cunning as a fox and as brave as a tiger. It is advisable to avoid it, preserve strength, and wait for the opportunity to win. ”
At that time, the East China Field Army had just been formed, and it had been besieged by the Kuomintang army many times before, so naturally it would not choose Hu Lian's entire 11th Division to confront it. With Su Yu's fighting style, he had always pinched soft persimmons to fight, so he set his sights on the entire 69th Division. If you want to think that the whole 69th Division is a nest of waste, then underestimate this division, in the War of Liberation, the integrated division was not actually a division, but an army formation, the whole 69th Division is also a unit with nearly 30,000 people.
The difference between the entire 69th Division and the ordinary Kuomintang army is that it was composed of Chiang Ching-kuo's Youth Expeditionary Force, and in early 1945, Chiang Ching-kuo, with the support of Chiang Kai-shek, intended to form a youth expeditionary force, and the soldiers recruited were all young people with a certain cultural foundation and able to adapt to the present war.
It is in line with Chiang Kai-shek's political slogan, "One inch of mountains and rivers and one inch of blood, one hundred thousand young people and one hundred thousand troops." After all, Chiang Kai-shek is old and will pass the throne to Chiang Ching-kuo sooner or later, so the establishment of the Youth Expeditionary Force is actually to pave the way for Chiang Ching-kuo, so that Chiang Ching-kuo will be able to take the throne in the future and be able to have his own concubines.
The Youth Expeditionary Force organized a total of more than a dozen divisions, but after the victory of the War of Resistance, the old men under Chiang Kai-shek feared that Chiang Kai-shek would abandon them as soon as he ascended to the throne, so they divided up the Youth Army, and the entire 69th Division was the only remaining unit, reorganized from three divisions into the 18th Army, and later reorganized into the 69th Division, with Dai Zhiqi as the division commander.
Dai Zhiqi was a follower of the old Chiang Kai-shek and Xiao Jiang, graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy in his early years, and later went to the Army University for further study, and when Xiao Jiang was in the training class for young cadres in Jiangxi, he took Dai Zhiqi under his command, and he was always regarded by those Kuomintang bigwigs as the dog legs of the Chiang family.
Dai Zhiqi, who was born in culture, was loyal to the Jiang family, and wherever the Jiang family let him fight, he rushed to wherever he went, and there was a lot of energy, but it was too bookish and idealistic, and he was not too good at fighting, a bit of Zhao Kuo's taste of talking on paper.
The main reason why Su Yu chose Dai Zhiqi to fight was also because he knew a little about Dai Zhiqi; it turned out that Su Yu had gone to Xuzhou to negotiate with the Kuomintang deputies when he was in the Central China Military Region, and when Su Yu left Xuzhou, it was Dai Zhiqi, deputy chief of staff of the Xuzhou Appeasement Office, who sent him off. ”
Su Yu listened dismissively and replied to Dai Zhiqi: "Unfortunately, the planes in the sky cannot go to the ground to capture the prisoners!" ”
Ten months later, Su Yu met Dai Zhiqi on the battlefield, and Su Yu still knew a little about Dai Zhiqi, so he made up his mind to attack this enemy who had seen him once. Su Yu immediately issued an order to block the entire 11th Division from the front, divide the entire 69th Division, and annihilate it.
On December 14, the entire 11th Division and the entire 69th Division entered the intended battlefield and were immediately cut off, and on December 15, Hu Lian accused Dai Zhiqi of moving aggressively, while Dai Zhiqi accused Hu Lian of moving slowly, and when the two men argued endlessly, a fight had already begun there.
In order to focus on "taking care" of the entire 69th Division, Su Yu sent Huaye 1st Column and the 8th Division, the former responsible for interspersed division, and the latter responsible for seizing the commanding heights.
At that time, the 1st column was too fierce, directly into the hinterland of the entire 11th Division, the commander of the first column Ye Fei took a look, and quickly retreated, but there was still a brigade that could not be contacted, and later learned that this brigade fought a vigorous movement battle in the hinterland of the entire 11th Division, which made Hu Lian extremely shocked, it is said that there was still three hundred meters to surprise the division headquarters, and finally the firepower was insufficient, and it was blocked again, so he ran back.
This "random playing of the piano" of the 1 column frightened Hu Lian's courage, did not dare to make a big move, and received a miraculous effect.
However, the attack of the 8th Division was in a dilemma, and the commanding height to be seized by the 8th Division was a small mountain bag at an altitude of more than 800 meters, which was crucial to the defense of the entire 69th Division, so Dai Zhiqi gave his subordinates a death order to hold this hill.
The two sides fought fiercely at Fengshan, fighting from night to morning, all night, at this time Huaye's soldiers knew that if they could not take this stronghold, then the Subei Campaign might change, the battle was lost, and the East China Field Army might fall into a more difficult situation. Therefore, they all rushed upwards desperately, and after paying a huge price, they finally conquered the mountain, and then the East China Field Army completed the encirclement of the entire 69th Division.
Although Dai Zhiqi ordered that the Fengshan position be retaken at all costs, it would not be so easy to retake the position captured by the People's Liberation Army. Under such circumstances, Dai Zhiqi had to ask Hu Lian for support, Hu Lian was quite shrewd, you let me fight defensive battles, there was no problem in fighting sports wars, you let me break through the communist army's reinforcement defense line, that was a dream.
On December 17, Hu Lian was still lamenting: "Mr. Dai is unimaginable", but he did not intend to send troops, Dai Zhiqi had to ask Chiang Kai-shek for help, and Chiang Kai-shek was immediately furious when he learned of this, and gave Hu Lian an order that if Hu Lian was strictly ordered to reinforce the entire 69th Division at all costs, if he did not rescue him, he would come to Nanjing with his own head.
Hu Lian then sent two brigades to the rescue, and the artillery fire of the entire 11th Division was not a joke, and there was also the support of aircraft on it, which was a wild bombardment, and it was directly blindfolded.
At the most critical moment in the encirclement and annihilation of the 69th Division, when the command issued an order for Ye Fei to lead the 1st column to withdraw from the battlefield, Ye Fei said angrily: "In broad daylight, open land, and in the depth of the enemy, the enemy is on all sides, and a column of more than 10,000 people, how to withdraw?" In the end, Ye Fei told everyone to stick to the end, and if not, they would retreat at night.
Sometimes the war is fought with persistence, and in the end, whoever persists will win. The first to rout was the 18th Brigade, which was sent by the integrated 11th Division to support, which also contributed to the final rout of Dai Zhiqi's entire 69th Division, and the soldiers of the entire 69th Division saw that the reinforcements had retreated, and the will of the troops to fight was even more depressed.
Dai Zhiqi put his hopes on the breakthrough, and the first to break through was the 60th Brigade of the entire 69th Division, and soon after the breakthrough was surrounded by the first column and the 8th Division in the mobile battle, which greatly weakened Dai Zhiqi's strength.
On December 17, Su Yu ordered all the troops to concentrate all their forces on the positions of the entire 69th Division, and under the overwhelming attack, the outer positions of the entire 69th Division were constantly lost, Dai Zhiqi knew that the defeat was decided, but he did not want to be a prisoner, so he was sorry for The Chiang family, so he chose to kill Chengren and commit suicide with a gun.
At the end of the Subei Campaign, when counting the number of people, the annihilation of more than 21,000 Kuomintang people was the first major victory won by the Kuomintang since the kuomintang frantically targeted the liberated areas of East China in the first half of 1946.
However, when counting the prisoners, the deputy division commander of the entire 69th Division, the chief of staff, the deputy chief of staff, and others were found, but the division commander Dai Zhiqi was not found, because at that time, dai Zhiqi was not known to have committed suicide.
So HuaYe's cadres personally interrogated the whereabouts of Dai Zhiqi's aide-de-camp Pang Bailin Dai Zhiqi, and when he fled, he was very confused, and he only had to flee for his life, and he did not know where Dai Zhiqi had gone. But Pang Bailin looked at the shoes of the reporter accompanying the East China Field Army next to him, and was stunned, because these shoes were worn by Zhiqi.
The reporter said that when he crossed the trench with the commando, his feet sank into the ice cave, and his shoes were wet and frozen, and later the officer of the security section took a pair of shoes from the body of a deceased person and changed them. Pang Bailin said that in the entire 69th Division, only Dai Zhiqi wore one pair of such shoes, because this was a gift from Wu Feitian, the mayor of Renhe District, to Dai Zhiqi, and Pang Bailin clearly remembered.
In this way, Dai Zhiqi may have died, so the personnel in charge of the inventory found the location where the reporter said that the shoes were obtained, looked for the body without shoes among the nearby corpses, and finally found a soldier without shoes, wearing the uniform of a Kuomintang lieutenant general, and judged by the gunshot wound on the temple on his head that this was Dai Zhiqi.
After the confirmation of Pang Bailin and others, this is Dai Zhiqi.
Subsequently, some of Dai Zhiqi's personal belongings, including the badge, the diary, and a short sword, were sent to Su Yu, who had mixed feelings, looked at this "Zhongzheng Sword" for a long time, and thought of Dai Zhiqi," who was also a meritorious general on the anti-Japanese battlefield. "Explain that he committed suicide not to be loyal to Chiang's father and son, but to be disappointed by Chiang Kai-shek's policy of launching a civil war."
This soldier who was once admitted to the preparatory department of Wuchang Normal University, and then gave up his pen to change the country, wanted to use military strength to change the country, was admitted to the fourth phase of Huangpu, often regarded himself as a revolutionary fighter, and participated in many battles that he regarded as very glorious, such as the Northern Expedition of the National Revolutionary Army, the War of Resistance Against Japan, and so on.
However, the Northern Expedition was victorious, the War of Resistance was victorious, and the country still had no peace, but his loyal Mr. Jiang was repeatedly keen to start a civil war. At this moment, he really mourned more than his heart died, and for Chiang Kai-shek, he never knew how many of his generals at this moment already had such a thought as Dai Zhiqi.
Su Yu may never understand what happened to Dai Zhiqi, and those who believe in communism will never have the grief of the Kuomintang generals. However, Su Yu still respected this cultured division commander and told his subordinates: Find a good coffin and bury Master Dai.
This was the first time since the National Government launched the civil war that an integrated division had been completely annihilated, and in the case of seemingly full blooming, such a record appeared, and the impact was naturally enormous.
Upon learning that Dai Zhiqi had committed suicide and that the entire 69th Division had been wiped out, Chairman Mao was very happy and sent a congratulatory telegram to Su Yu: "Celebrate the great victory on the Sumu front, and hope to pass on orders and reward all meritorious soldiers." ”
For the army that has been defeated and retreated in the East China Battlefield, it is too much to need such a victory to boost morale.
Of course, this battle also had an impact on the morale of the Kuomintang, and when the Nationalist Ministry of National Defense later resumed the Battle of Subei, it criticized the Xuzhou Appeasement Office for failing to form a situation of coordinated operations with each other, "so that when the corps were besieged by each other, they could not remedy it, incurring heavy losses." ”
Speaking of which, the Kuomintang Ministry of National Defense still had several talents with higher military theories, which also contributed to chiang kai-shek's later operational change to focus on the offensive, and the various units formed echelons and marched in coordination, making it impossible for the PLA to grasp the ones that were left alone.
In fact, even in the key offensive stage, the well-equipped reorganized 74th Division, such as Zhang Lingfu, had two reorganized divisions left and right, Li Tianxia and Huang Baitao, and when Zhang Lingfu was surrounded, no one came to the rescue; during the Liberation War, the most frequent performance of the Kuomintang on the battlefield was that there was a single one that was surrounded, and then there was no way to save it.
The reason for this is that there is a problem with the Kuomintang army, when a force of army is under siege, the nearest troops are rarely able to go all out to rescue, it can be said that Chiang Kai-shek just saw how many troops he had on his books, thinking that he was sure of winning, so he launched a civil war, but did not consider whether the generals really loved to fight a civil war. All the soldiers are thinking about themselves, wanting to preserve their strength, where is the morale of such an army?
In contrast, the East China Field Army was merged from the previous two field armies into one field army, but it was able to trust each other, cooperate with each other, and face the enemy together, which was scarce in the Kuomintang army.
Su Yu later summed up the significance of the Subei Campaign: "When this battle is won, the brotherly troops will have mutual trust, and the new leading bodies and subordinate units after the merger of the two field armies will also produce mutual trust between the upper and lower levels." All of this is priceless. ”
In this battle, Su Yu was commanded as the deputy commander of the East China Field Army, which proved that the Central Military Commission did not look at the wrong person, su Yu was a person who could be of great use, and on April 30, 1948, Mao Zedong said to Su Yu, Chen Yi will not return to the East China Field Army, and the work of the East China Field Army will be carried out by you in the future!
Although Su Yu repeatedly asked Mao Zedong to keep Chen Yi, Mao Zedong still said that Chen Yi had a greater responsibility to work in the newly established Central Plains Bureau, and Su Yu still requested that Chen Yi be retained as the commander of the East China Field Army, and that he act as the commander and political commissar of the East China Field Army.
After that, the Central Plains Field Army and the East China Field Army cooperated with each other to give the Kuomintang army a head-on blow, and the war entered a turning point.