At the beginning of 1947, Chen Yi, commander of the East China Field Army, and Su Yu, deputy commander of the East China Field Army, received intelligence: In order to set up a fire, Chen Cheng, who had just taken office, led 8 reorganized divisions to launch the "Battle of Lunan" with Ou Zhen, commander of the 19th Army, as the commander-in-chief, in order to crush the newly established East China Field Army in one fell swoop. Su Yu's eyes revealed a subtle excitement: Ou Zhen, this time you are finally coming to me!
Ou Zhen, a native of Qujiang, Guangdong, graduated from Shaozhou Middle School and worked as a primary school teacher. At that time, the warlords of China were in a scuffle, and the people were not happy, and Ou Zhen came into contact with Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary ideas, so he decided to throw himself into the pen and take the road of military salvation. Soon after, he entered the Guangdong Army's Lecture Hall to study, and after graduation, he was incorporated into the 12th Division of the 4th Army of the National Revolutionary Army and served as a battalion commander in the 2nd Regiment. At that time, the 2nd Regiment had a glorious name- Ye Ting Independent Regiment.
In the following Northern Expedition War, Ou Zhen performed eye-catchingly. At the Battle of Tingsi Bridge, Ou Zhen attacked the enemy's main position at night, occupied the bridgehead with a white-knife battle, and controlled the key charge in and out of Wuhan; during the siege of Wuchang, Ou Zhen was the first to climb the city wall; in the Battle of Deguan against Sun Chuanfang and the Battle of Linying against Zhang Zuolin, Ou Zhen led the weak troops to repel the strong enemy, showing strong combat effectiveness.
A major event in 1927 changed the fate of China, but it failed to change the fate of Ou Zhen. This year, the August 1st Uprising, which marked the establishment of the people's army, broke out, and Ou Zhen, along with Ye Ting, fired the first shot of the people's army! During the uprising, the fledgling Su Yu performed well, being shot through the temporal bone of the head during the battle, but still caught up with the team with amazing perseverance. But Ou Zhen, who should have been more eye-catching, was disappointing, and was incognito in all the battles. When the rebel troops marched south and passed through Tangkeng in the Chaoshan area, the troops were surrounded and suppressed by Xue Yue and others, and began a collapse-like collapse, which eventually led to the failure of the entire Nanchang Uprising. Later, General Xiao Ke, who personally experienced the uprising, recalled: "The Battle of Tangkeng was a turning point in the Nanchang Uprising from victory to defeat. ”
Strangely, after the Battle of Tangkeng, Ou Zhen broke away from the rebel ranks and began to appear in the Kuomintang troops. That is to say, when the battle reached a critical moment, Ou Zhen became a shameful traitor! At this time, due to the lack of clear historical evidence, whether Ou Zhen left the team in the form of "defection before the battle" has always been inconsistent. However, it is undeniable that the troops attacked in Tangkeng at that time were mainly the Seventy-first Regiment of the Twenty-fourth Division, Ou Zhen's old unit; and Ou Zhen was also in the Kuomintang camp after the failure of the Nanchang Uprising.
After breaking away from the rebel ranks, Ou Zhen successively defected to Deng Longguang and Xue Yue, and had a reliable backing. In the ensuing War of Resistance Against Japan, Ou Zhen showed the bloodiness of a Chinese soldier, successively participating in the Battle of Songhu, the Battle of Nanxun, the Battle of Changsha, and the Battle of Changde, fighting many bloody battles with the Japanese and Koukou, making many military achievements, and becoming a generation of famous anti-Japanese generals. Later, relying on the merits of the hard state, Ou Zhen was promoted to deputy commander-in-chief of the 27th Group Army.
On Ou Zhen's body, there is a kind of confucian elegance. The War of Resistance Against Japan was the catalyst for his character. After every battle with the invaders, the fiery blood in his chest always triggered his poetry. At the Battle of Nanjing, the Kuomintang retreated in an all-round way, and Ou Zhen had to give up his duty to defend the capital. During the withdrawal, he felt grief and wrote a seven-law poem:
"Retreat Thanks"
The wind on the lake is miserable, and the long causeway is long.
The three armies were furious, and the people burst into tears.
State affairs have been long and restless, and the future is not easy to ask.
The sacrifice was originally a boy's zhi, and the blood was not empty and the bones were not cold.
This kind of nostalgia is the driving force behind his heroic battle on the battlefield in the future.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Ou Zhen was promoted to commander-in-chief of the 10th Group Army and commander of the reorganized 19th Army, and came to East China with Xue Yue. In 1946, when the armed struggle was at its low ebb, the combat effectiveness of the People's Liberation Army fell into a trough, and Xue Yue successively captured important cities such as Huaiyin and Lianshui, and even the later founding marshal Chen Yi admitted that he had "not fought well in the past three months." However, later, with the merger of the two major field armies in Shandong and central China into the East China Field Army, the troops gradually completed their reorganization, and Su Yu, who had strong combat effectiveness, also became the military leader, and the situation in the entire East China region was suddenly improved. In early 1947, the Battle of Lunan ended with a total victory for the People's Liberation Army, and Ma Liwu's reorganized 26th Division and Zhou Yuying's reorganized 51st Division were annihilated. At this time, people from other factions of the Kuomintang made a fierce personal attack on Xue Yue, and Chen Cheng, who had originally sat in the background, had to come forward to clean up the chaos.
Soon after, Chen Cheng came to Xuzhou and personally served as a military commander. He and Xue Yue ignored the objections of Wang Yaowu, the commander-in-chief of the Second Appeasement District, and insisted on launching another "Battle of Lunan" shortly after the defeat in the Battle of Lunan, concentrating the strong forces of 8 reorganized divisions on the southern front, and also letting Wang Yaowu's right-hand man Li Xianzhou lead three armies, totaling more than 300,000 troops, to launch a pincer offensive against Linyi, the capital of the People's Liberation Army in Shandong.
Before the plan had even begun, the details had already been leaked to Chen Yi and Su Yu by the legendary military spy Anderson Han Liancheng, commander of the 46th Army. When Su Yu looked at the name of the commander-in-chief of the Southern Front, he couldn't help but laugh. Ou Zhen, after twenty years of going around, we finally met on the battlefield again.
However, the contrast in strength between the two sides made Su Yu have no choice to face this rebel general on the battlefield. Ou Zhen had 8 reorganized divisions under his command, with a strength of more than 200,000 troops, well-equipped, strong combat effectiveness, and a complete hard bone. Su Yu had 11 columns under his command, with a total strength of no more than 350,000 troops, and after the bad luck of 1946, the vitality had yet to be restored, and there was really no need to fight with Ou Zhen, not to mention that there were Li Xianzhou and the elite 73rd Army on the northern front. After studying with Commander Chen Yi, the two decided to take the initiative to retreat, using their own movements to pull the enemy's front and look for opportunities to annihilate their prominent troops.
I have to say that Ou Zhen is indeed much stronger than Hu Zongnan in the northwest battlefield. Hu Zongnan experienced three major defeats before he figured out the truth that he could not go deep alone. Ou Zhen understood this from the very beginning, so he strictly ordered that all units must maintain a posture of advancing in parallel and must be closely linked to each other. This kind of moving iron barrel array made it difficult for Chen Yi and Su Yu to find fighters.
Since this was the case, the two commanders, Chen Yi and Su Yu, after consultation, decided to turn the target of the attack to Li Xianzhou on the northern front. However, Su Yu was also worried that if the army moved north, would Ou Zhen lead his troops to attack his back? If this is the case, the East China Field Army will be attacked from the belly and back, and the situation will be very dangerous. So he decided to test the waters with the Kuomintang Forty-second Army.
The Status of the Forty-second Group Army of the Kuomintang was very awkward. Its commander, Hao Pengju, was a defector in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and after the liberation war began, he was defeated by the People's Liberation Army and chose to surrender to the People's Liberation Army. In January 1947, seeing that the situation had changed, he rebelled again, drawing a force of about 20,000 people and surrendering to Chiang Kai-shek. In order to win him over, Chiang Kai-shek gave him the title of the Forty-second Army. But this force has its own surface, and its combat effectiveness is actually extremely low. Therefore, Su Yu decided to destroy Li Xianzhou before going north to attack them. On the one hand, warn all those who are not determined, and on the other hand, see if Ou Zhen will make a move.
So on February 7, 1947, more than 20,000 people of the Forty-second Group Army were wiped out, and Hao Pengju was arrested again. Ou Zhen did not receive chen cheng's order to rescue the other party and became a boring spectator. Based on this, Su Yu concluded that the Kuomintang command was too cautious and would not have a relatively rapid large-scale military operation. Therefore, the PLA troops went north with confidence to eliminate the Li Xianzhou clique.
On February 15, the retreat of the People's Liberation Army allowed Ou Zhen to successfully occupy Linyi. Ou Zhen could not hide his excitement, and immediately verified the results of the battle with the commanders on the front line, and finally attracted the "false report of military merit" from the bottom up. Ou Zhen calculated, good fellow, I actually annihilated 16 brigades of Su Yu in this attack! The East China Field Army was already "suffering heavy casualties and could not withstand another battle"! If this is not to defeat Su Yu, then what else can be counted? So he quickly reported the results of the battle to Chen Cheng, and Chen Cheng also reported it to Chiang Kai-shek at the first time. The entire Kuomintang clique was in a state of blind optimism.
However, on February 20, the East China Field Army launched the Battle of Laiwu, which annihilated Li Xianzhou's clique in just three days, and the Nationalists lost a total of 56,000 people, and the plan of a north-south attack was also in vain. By the time Ou Zhen reacted, the People's Liberation Army had already won a victory, and the Liberated Areas of Bohai, Luzhong, and Jiaodong had already become one. Fortunately, Ou Zhen himself did not have much to lose. The first confrontation between the two nanchang uprising veterans ended in Su Yu's victory, but Ou Zhen was not yet completely defeated.
More than two months later, the Battle of Meng Lianggu almost made Ou Zhen lose everything completely.
In early May 1947, after more than a month of tug-of-war, Chiang Kai-shek lost patience and ordered the First Corps, with the integrated 74th Division as its backbone, to "boldly advance" and attack the road control area from Yishui to Mengyin. Alone and deep, this is the opportunity that Su Yu is waiting for! Therefore, at dawn on the 15th, the 6th Column and the 1st Column of the East China Field Army staged the retreat of the reorganized 74th Division, and with the cooperation of the 8th Column, completed the encirclement of the enemy in the lushan and Menglianggu areas.
In the face of this form, Chiang Kai-shek intended to carry out a "central blossoming" counter-encirclement, with the integration of the 74th Division to attract the East China Field Army, while other units attacked from the periphery, in a vain attempt to eliminate the People's Liberation Army in one fell swoop! However, in order to ensure that the offensive troops could safely solve the problem of the integrated 74th Division, Chen Yi and Su Yu arranged four columns of the 2nd, 3rd, 7th, and 10th columns to serve as reinforcements, and a large number of local troops cooperated with the operation. This kind of iron barrel array eventually made all of Chiang Kai-shek's rescue operations come to naught, and the reorganized 74th Division of the "Royal Forest Army" was completely annihilated. Ou Zhen, who was lackluster as the commander of the reinforcements, was also ordered to return to the military academy to study, and then stayed away from the battlefields of North China and East China.
Later, Ou Zhen still maintained the same action as Xue Yue. Xue Yue later organized a defensive line in Guangdong and a "Boling Defense Line" in Hainan, and Ou Zhen was an important helper to him. However, with the total defeat of the Kuomintang on the mainland, Ou Zhen could only flee to Taiwan to settle down, and lived on the idle salary of "member of the Construction planning committee of the National Security Council".
Like most Kuomintang generals, Ou Zhen in his later years was homesick. He has a deep affection for his hometown, and even in his military career, he has returned to his hometown many times to build a primary school, build a reservoir, a highway, and plant landscape trees for his hometown. Now far from home, the feeling of longing is even more urgent. But unfortunately, in that era, he did not have the opportunity to come back, which is really regrettable. In Ou Zhen's later years, his favorite thing to do is to reminisce with his fellow countrymen about the past years. Whenever he was excited, he would say: "The iron rule of history, unity for a long time will be divided, a long time will be united, and the peaceful reunification of the country will eventually come!"
In 1969, Ou Zhen died of illness in Taiwan, and finally failed to set foot on his homeland. Although he once betrayed the Chinese revolution, as a Chinese, he still did not lose his great love, and he was a hero who resisted foreign humiliation and loved his hometown. It is hoped that his wish for reunification can be realized at an early date.