During the period of the agrarian revolution, in addition to the guerrillas, The Red Guards, the Kuomintang regular army, the local security regiment, and the landlord militia regiment, there was also a large number of armed groups with complex internal problems, and uneven good and bad, which were collectively called the "Great Knife Society." This is a kind of mass armed group with strong feudal religious superstitions, generally with the call of "protecting the family and guarding against bandits", often used by landlords, becoming cannon fodder for clan armed struggles, and being deceived into making enemies with the Red Army and guerrillas.
Although the Big Knife Society rarely had guns and fought with darts, before the battle, they mainly chanted incantations, drank rune water, and made one by one drunk, and they started a battle and went crazy to charge in clusters, and the momentum was quite frightening.
In 1932, the armed forces owned by our army suffered many losses from the Big Knife Club. In order to solve this problem, Ye Fei, who was then an inspector of the mindong guerrilla zone, once found some big knife masters for a discussion. I learned that the reason why the disciples of the Great Knife Society bravely charged was that one was superstitious about the "spell" of "swords and guns", running and moving when charging, and it was not easy to be hit by bullets, and the other was that the rune water they drank in their stomachs when they were in battle contained certain stimulant components. However, the doping made by this indigenous method cannot last long, and both wrestling and cold water stimulation will make the effect end prematurely.
After mastering the "inside situation", Ye Fei and others, according to the characteristics of the big knife club mainly using shuttle darts, explored the essentials of fighting with the big knife club: choose paddy fields or passes to open the battlefield, and do not give the big knife club disciples a wide front, so that they cannot exert the power of the group charge. When fighting in groups of three, the person at the front of the line holds a bamboo fork and the two people in the back use rifles. In groups of five, the first two men hold bamboo forks, and the back three are armed with two spears and a rifle. When the soldiers were short, the man with the bamboo fork crossed the neck of the leader of the large knife to stop him from advancing, and the others counterattacked with spears and rifles.
This style of play is similar to Qi Jiguang's "Mandarin Duck Formation" of that year. After adopting this tactic, the armed forces owned by our army never suffered any more losses in the confrontation with the Big Knife Society, and achieved a record of total victory and undefeated victory. However, the number of disciples of the Great Knife Society is really large, and many of them are poor people. It is seriously opposed to the big knife and is very unfavorable to winning the support of the masses.
Ye Fei pondered that the landlords and the peasant masses could organize a big knife meeting just by having common interests in "protecting the family and guarding against bandits." And why can't the Communist Party, which represents the fundamental interests of the broad masses of workers and peasants, organize the Big Red Knife Society to defend the peasants' associations? Moreover, the Red Dagger Society could not only attract the politically neutral peasant masses, but also cover the revolutionary-leaning activists among the peasant masses, and avoid prematurely exposing their armed forces.
Ye Fei's thoughts did not come out of thin air. At that time, with the deepening of the peasant movement in eastern Fujian, some members of the Great Dao Society had already joined the peasant association, and even some great knife society mages were affected to become members of the peasant association, and some mages joined the party because of their progress in performance. After obtaining the consent of the Fu'an Central County Committee, Ye Fei began to organize the Red Armed Forces in the form of a large knife society. Internally, these armed forces are partisans, those who do not leave production are the Red Guards, and externally they are called the Great Knife Society.
Fan Jun, who was working in the Shouning County Party Committee at that time, was one of the initiators of the county's Red Knife Society. Fan Jun developed the Red Dagger Society from his hometown of Da'an to the villages in the northwest, east, and north districts where there were peasant associations. The specific method is to first select villages with a work foundation, select activists, bring their own grain up the mountain to participate in training courses, and specially teach how to organize the skills of the big knife meeting. After a period of training, the trainees are then assigned to the villages for development. By the spring of 1933, the Red Dagger Society was widely established in the Western to Eastern and Southern Districts of Shoushou.
In July and August 1933, there was also a red knife club in Fu'an South District. During the fujian uprising, the armed forces of our party surrounded the county seat of Xiapu for three days and three nights. Among them, there were only more than a hundred guerrillas, but as many as three thousand members of the Red Dagger Society. After that, the consolidated areas openly displayed the banner of the Soviets and the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army and established the Red Guards, but still did not abolish the organization of the Red Knife Society.
After the red knife club was organized, the internal relationship between the big knife club in eastern Fujian became intricate. In the winter of 1933, in the Baizhuyang area where the Fu'an Central County Party Committee is located, most of the big knives will be red, but the big knives downstairs will be controlled by the landlord bullies, and the big knives on the mountain will be neutral. In order to provoke the relationship between the Red Knife Society and the Mountain Knife Society, the landlord bullies came forward from the downstairs Big Knife Society and falsely accused Ye Fei of being a bandit spy to the Mountain Knife Society. As a result, the mountain knife society in the unknown tied up Ye Fei and the meat tickets of Shi Lin, the secretary of the district party committee.
However, although Ye Fei's identity at that time had not yet been revealed, Shi Lin was the "leader" of the reactionary vigilante group's reward for arrest. When they found that they had provoked the Communist Party, the big knife club on the mountain did not know what to do for a while, and the big knife club downstairs took the opportunity to lure them not to do anything, and simply took the "leader of the communist bandits" to receive the bounty.
This move is obviously intended to provoke the red big knife and the big knife on the mountain to fire. After in-depth study, the Fu'an Central County Party Committee felt that it was better to use the method of peaceful rescue to help win the Mountain Knife Society in the future. So they asked the local fighters to act as intermediaries and go up the mountain to negotiate. On the one hand, ye Fei and Shi Lin were openly admitted to being party members, and if these two people made a mistake, they would definitely step on the mountain to the big knife meeting. On the other hand, in view of the fact that the big knife on the mountain will covet the bounty and love face, and promise to pay a ransom equivalent to the bounty, it should be "no fight and no acquaintance", and everyone will make friends with each other.
This "two-pronged" strategy of both enticing and coercing them has worked. After the Big Knife Society on the Mountain learned of Ye Fei's identity, it not only happily released Ye Fei and Shi Lin, but also made a joint defense agreement with our party: mutual non-aggression, mutual notification of bandits, and coordination to protect the border and the people. In this way, the Mountain Knife Society became an ally of the Red Great Knife Society.
After dividing and disintegrating, cracking down on the leading evil elements, and winning over the vast number of members, the vast majority of the members of the more than thirty big knife associations in Zhoudun, Xidi, Lingtou, and other places were won over by our party. A small number of large knives controlled by landlords will be isolated and will be hit by the red large knives, and will disintegrate in a short period of time. The problem of the Great Knife Society, which had plagued the eastern Fujian region for many years, was completely solved.