1948 was a year of complete reversal of the military strength of the kuomintang and the communists, the year broke out the three major battles of the liberation war, after the end of the Liaoshen Campaign in November 1948, the total strength of our army in the national army exceeded 3 million, surpassing the Kuomintang army in numbers, and since then the nationalist army has been defeated to the end. However, the year of the real collapse of the Kuomintang army in the Liberation War was not 1948, when it suffered successive military defeats, but the year before.
On December 31, 1947, the supreme commander of the Nationalist Army, who had always maintained the habit of keeping diaries, wrote in his diary the words "The report of defeat is like a snowflake flying, only to obey the destiny", which was in stark contrast to the conceit in the early days of the Liberation War, and at the end of 1947, he had already foreseen the outcome of the war. Why?
In China during the Liberation War, more than 300 million of the 400 million people were peasants who made a living from arable land. The social status quo is that less than 10 percent of the people control more than 90% of the country's capital, the original landless peasants account for an absolute majority of the country's population, and the long-term war and chaos have aggravated rural poverty, that is, the poverty of the majority of the people in China; although the Kuomintang government is supported by the Jiangsu and Zhejiang consortiums and the United States, and has a national tax as a material guarantee, the war is a complex system, not completely by military equipment and military skills to achieve the end. The combat effectiveness of the army, which is not supported by manpower, people's hearts and morale, will not be in a strong state, especially when the opponents faced by the Kuomintang government have also grasped their weakest class disadvantage and maximized this gap. The military defeat of the Nationalist army began at the social level, and 1947 was the most critical year.
In 1947, our side carried out large-scale land reform in the liberated areas of the whole country and promulgated the "Outline of China's Land Law", which enabled hundreds of millions of people to obtain land and ensure basic livelihood. The direct effect of the land reform is the rapid improvement of our army's strength and logistical support, and with the support of the overwhelming majority of the people, the balance between the Kuomintang and the Communists has obviously tilted. A detail that makes people laugh at the same time, many Kuomintang grassroots officers and the vast number of soldiers, during the war with our army, learned that their fathers and mothers in their hometowns were allocated land, and the people's liberation army was opposite the trenches. Some people say that our side has succeeded in carrying out land reform, so why can't the Kuomintang government follow suit and compete with our side for the people's hearts and minds? The government also wants to, but the class composition and the consortium behind it are not allowed, and if the land reform is carried out on the mainland, it will only lose faster, which is the natural disadvantage of the national army.
Specific to the direct military level. Benefiting from powerful policies such as land reform, the Northeast People's Liberation Army recruited troops rapidly north of the Songhua River, breaking through 500,000 troops in mid-1947, suppressing the Kuomintang forces in the region for the first time, and launching successive counteroffensives. By the end of 1947, the regular troops of Dongye had approached 700,000, reducing the Kuomintang army to a narrow geographical range, directly crushing the old Chiang Kai-shek's number one concubine, General Chen Cheng, and replacing the commander-in-chief of the Northeast Suppression Army with Wei Lihuang at the beginning of the following year. But at this time, the situation in the northeast was actually irreversible, and it was useless to change who was the commander-in-chief. The situation of our army in the northeast was clear and a strategic army was formed, paving the way for the national counteroffensive in the following year.
Other theaters also made significant progress in 1947, with Liu Deng Zhongye going south to contain the Kuomintang forces in central China; Chen Su's troops in east China reversed their inferiority in 1946 and won consecutive victories in Shandong to annihilate a large number of the main forces of the Kuomintang army (including Zhang Lingfu's 74th Division), which was another major offensive force outside dongye; the northwest battlefield could even take the initiative to abandon Yan'an, and use the maximum movement warfare to contain more than 200,000 main forces of Hu Zongnan's group, forcing the other side to keep going around in circles. The main offensive of the main attack, the containment of the containment, the national war situation in 1947 were all in accordance with the routine set by our army. According to the 47-year fighting style and tactics of the Kuomintang and the Communists, the Kuomintang army was already waiting for death, and the defeat of the second year was inevitable. In the War of Liberation, the Nationalist army had already foreshadowed defeat, and the time of real collapse was precisely in 1947 before the Armageddon.