In 1946, Xue Yue commanded 25 and a half brigades, divided into four routes based in Dongtai, Zhuanyin, Suqian, and Yixian Counties, and launched an attack on the entire line east of Yancheng, Lianshui, Muyang, and Yixian in our liberated areas.
In the Four Roads Army, Hu Lian's reorganized 11th Division and Dai Zhiqi's reorganized 69th Division were entrenched in Suqian. Wu Qiwei, deputy director of the Xuzhou Jinsui Public Office, the "commander-in-chief" of the two reorganized divisions, ordered Hu Lian's reorganized 11th Division to march east to attack Muyang, and ordered Dai Zhiqi's reorganized 69th Division to go north to attack the town of Xin'an north of Suqian in an attempt to seize the "first merit."
Wu Qiwei was a completely faint "commander-in-chief." Not to mention whether this can be achieved victory, just dividing the troops and marching forward and going on a lonely expedition is a big taboo for soldiers. What is even more fatal is that Wu Qiwei, the lord who can only sit in his office and give orders, without investigating the entire battlefield situation, actually took it for granted that the Shandong Field Army and the Central China Field Army were in Lunan and northern Jiangsu, and even he once "cleverly" predicted that our army's strength in Muyang City was empty.
But in fact, Muyang City is not only not an empty city, but our army has also arranged 24 regiments of the Shandong Field Army to defend it tightly, and Wu Qiwei's blind command has exposed the weakness of Hu Lian's reorganized 11th Division and Dai Zhiqi's reorganized 69th Division exposing the weakness of excessive gaps and inconvenient assistance.
What was even more frightening was that because Hu Lian's 11th Division had just been transferred from the battlefields of the Central Plains and was very unfamiliar with huaibei and the local people's feelings with a dense river network, Hu Lian adopted a cautious attitude and cautious marching, which caused the plan of the 11th Division and the 69th Division to coordinate operations was completely disrupted.
Objectively speaking, this really can't be blamed on Hu Lian, who is a famous general among the generals of the Nationalist army. He was a graduate of the fourth phase of the Whampoa Military Academy, and was called "Erhu" along with Hu Zongnan, the former known as the "King of Kinmen". Inside Jiang Jun, there were: "Ten northwest kings are not worth one King of the Golden Gate", which shows Hu Lian's prestige.
Not only was he famous, but his art of commanding war was also very good, and the reorganized 11th Division under his command was one of the main forces of the "five aces" in the Kuomintang army.
The predecessor of the reorganized 11th Division was the 18th Army of the National Revolutionary Army, under the jurisdiction of the 18th Army, the 11th Division, the 18th Division, the 118th Division, in 1946, the 18th Army was reorganized into the integrated 11th Division. This unit is the oldest and most powerful force in the Kuomintang's "five main forces", which is the earliest in terms of army building, the largest strength, and the largest number of famous generals. It became famous in the warlord melee, grew stronger than the encirclement and suppression of the Red Army, contributed to the anti-Japanese flames, and lost its troops to the Huaihai battlefield.
In the warlord melee in 1929, the 18th Army killed the warlord Tang Shengzhibu and lost his armor; in the Battle of Songhu in 1937, Hu Lian's 18th Army blew up the enemy's tanks with a cluster grenade with a daredevil courage and the courage to die, and the bayonet was red and fought with the Japanese to fight back more than a dozen large-scale Japanese charges in a day and night; in the Gaojialing Blockade Battle in the Shipailing Victory, Hu Lian wrote a fatal letter, leading the 18th Army to kill more than 2,000 Japanese koku with bayonets against the poisonous gas bombs of the Japanese Kou. In the Battle of Nanma in 1947, Hu Lian, relying on the ingenious Fortifications of Zimu Fort, stubbornly leveraged the onslaught of the four columns of our army plus the absolute superiority of the three regiments of the Luzhong Military Region with the strength of the 18th Division, forcing our army to withdraw from the battlefield after paying heavy casualties.
Judging from the fierce battle records of Hu Lian and the reorganized 11th Division above, it is not too much to call this unit the main force of the "five aces" of the Kuomintang.
General Su Yu once said that hu lian's reorganized 11th division in the Kuomintang's "five aces" army was particularly good at defending, and that whenever the 11th division that attacked Hu Lian always made people sweat. It should be said that General Su Yu's evaluation was more pertinent to Hu Lian's 11th Division.
Especially in the Battle of Subei, although Hu Lian's 11th Division and Dai Zhiqi's 69th Division strategically exposed weaknesses that were extremely easy to break through, it was not easy for our army to eat this "ace" main force.
In December of that year, the Battle of Subei began, and after our army had figured out the specific operational intentions of Hu Lian's 11th Division and Dai Zhiqi's 69th Division, Su Yu decided to take the lead in eating the 69th Division, which had weak combat strength, while blocking Hu Lian's 11th Division.
At that time, General Su Yu commanded the 1st Column and the 8th Division to penetrate from northwest to southeast to the rear of the 69th Division, occupying in one fell swoop the commanding heights of Fengshan Mountain, the place where the 69th Division must retreat, and at the same time, the 1st Column detoured to Cao Jiaji near Hu Lian's division headquarters, not only successfully cutting off the retreat route of the 69th Army, but also dividing the connection between Hu Lian and Dai Zhiqi's two divisions.
While Ye Fei's 1st Column cut off the enemy's retreat, the main forces of the 2nd Column and the 7th Division of the 9th Column of our army also launched a general offensive against the enemy from north to south, from northeast to southwest, and from east to west, respectively.
After the reorganized 69th Division was compressed into several villages, including Renhewei, Miaozhuang, and Luozhuang, our army, under the command of General Su Yu, launched a point-by-point annihilation battle against the enemy.
After four days of bitter fighting, our army achieved the division and encirclement of the 69th Division, and the collapse of the 69th Division embarked on an irreversible tragedy of fate. At this time, Wu Qiwei, the "commander-in-chief" of the 11th Division and the 69th Division, called on Hu Lian to "move closer to Mr. Dai (Dai Zhiqi)", Wu Qiwei blindly commanded, but Hu Lian was not confused, he realized that the 69th Division was afraid that the whole army would be destroyed, so he hurriedly replied, "Mr. Dai is unimaginable."
Sure enough, the development of the situation was just as Hu Lian predicted, and our army soon ate the entire 69th Division in one fell swoop, and Dai Zhiqi, who was from the Whampoa Military Academy, drew his gun and committed suicide in the face of the fiasco on the battlefield, fulfilling the foolish oath of "if you don't succeed, you will become a benevolent."
Dai Zhiqi finished playing, but Hu Lian was not as foolish as Dai Zhiqi, although his immediate superior Wu Qiwei had previously asked Hu Lian to move closer to the 69th Division with all his strength, he still ordered the 11th Division to retreat rapidly to the north of Suqian and south of the canal according to his own playing style, and honestly found a place that was easy to defend and difficult to attack and started a blockade battle.
When the Shandong Field Army commanded by Su Yu turned its gun and pounced on Hu Lian's 11th Division after collecting the 69th Division, Hu Lian had already built a defensive position, and Su Yumi could not divide the enemy and had to give up.
It was not until the Battle of Huaihai that the 11th Division finally embarked on the fate of total annihilation under the overwhelming blows of our army. Since then, Hu Lian's re-formed 11th Division has long ceased to be the fierce fighting force of the past.
The Battle of Subei was one of the many classic examples of the brigade of General Su Yu, in which Su Yu wanted to take advantage of the fierce Hu Lian to reorganize the 11th Division in one fell swoop, but he did not want the cunning Hu Lian to slip away from Su Yu's eyes like a loach, which has always become a major regret for General Su Yu in his life.
However, realistically speaking, Hu Lian was indeed very good at defending, and in the subsequent Battle of Kinmen, as Su Yu feared, Hu Lian dealt a fatal blow to our army, which eventually made our army hate Kinmen after paying a heavy price of more than 9,000 people.