The Battle of Huaihai is believed to be no stranger to everyone, and even people who do not know about war have certainly heard of this name. At the end of 1948, the Chinese Communists launched a large-scale campaign with more than one million participants in the vicinity of Xuzhou, in which our army won a complete victory and annihilated more than 500,000 enemy troops.
In June 1946, Chiang Kai-shek, ignoring the relevant contents of the Double Tenth Agreement, suddenly tore up the agreement, and hundreds of thousands of troops launched an all-out attack on the People's Liberation Army in the Central Plains, North China, and other regions. Before the outbreak of the all-out war, the balance of strength between our army and the Kuomintang army was very different, with our army having a total of more than 1.2 million troops, while the Kuomintang had more than 4.3 million troops, including a large number of troops trained and reorganized with American equipment, and many heavy artillery, aircraft, tanks, and so on. From a geographical point of view, the liberated areas controlled by our army are mainly in some economically underdeveloped areas, while the Kuomintang controls almost all large and medium-sized cities in our country and important ports, transportation hubs, railways, and so on. In particular, it is worth mentioning that before the war broke out in full swing, our army engaged in many confrontations with the Kuomintang army in local areas, and judging from the results of the battle, our army also lost cities that were more important than the four equals. Therefore, judging from the situation at that time, it was very critical for our army.
However, after the war broke out in an all-round way, the results of the war were not as disparity as the superficial strength, and considering that the current situation facing our army was very unfavorable, our army always insisted on fighting guerrilla warfare and movement warfare, and through continuous interspersing and constantly transferring, thus confusing the enemy, seeking local numerical superiority, and slowly eliminating the effective forces of Chiang Kai-shek's troops. In just one year, our army not only repelled the enemy's all-round offensive and key offensives, but also made our army show a strategic counter-offensive posture as the large army leaped thousands of miles into the Dabie Mountains, and has begun to slowly launch an offensive against some cities of the Kuomintang, recovering many important cities such as Jinan. By the end of 1948, only two years and a few months had passed since the War of Liberation, and after a long period of combat experience and an improvement in strength, our army was generally able to engage in head-on confrontation with the Kuomintang heavy army group. It was also at this time that our army gathered its main forces and fought three major battles against the Kuomintang. In these three major battles, our army can be said to have won a complete victory, annihilating a total of more than 1.5 million Kuomintang troops, most of the main forces of the Kuomintang were wiped out or reorganized by our army, and the rest were only a group of defeated generals. It was also because of these three major battles that our army gained an overwhelming advantage in the Liberation War, and the Kuomintang has since collapsed, and although it has relied on the Yangtze River Graben and the complex terrain in the southwest and southeast regions to resist one after another, it was finally broken by our powerful People's Liberation Army, and soon fled to the island of Taiwan.
Among these three major battles, the Battle of Huaihai can be said to be very classic, and it is often mentioned in today's military history discussions. In this battle, the strength of all the front-line combat troops of our army was 600,000 people, while the Kuomintang army was 800,000 people. From the perspective of weapons and equipment, our army mainly uses millet plus rifles, heavy weapons and artillery are relatively small, and tanks and aircraft cannot be talked about. In this campaign, the Kuomintang army gathered almost most of the elite troops in the vicinity, including the Huang Baitao Corps and the Huang Wei Corps, which were almost all armed with steel, and there were also du Yuming, Qiu Qingquan and other famous generals. Judging from the strength on paper, our army is at an all-round disadvantage, and there is almost no possibility of victory, so why did the elite heavy army group of the Kuomintang lose so completely in the end? Through the memories of veterans of the Nationalist Army who participated in the Battle of Huaihai, we may be able to find the answer.
Veterans recall this history and have a lot of feelings. He believes that although the People's Liberation Army has only 600,000 front-line combat troops on the surface, there are countless people behind it to help them transport materials and supplies and help them solve all their worries. This is also related to some of our army's policies of benefiting the people in peacetime, through the way of dividing up the land among local tycoons, many peasants have been given land, and from the bottom of their hearts they are also very grateful to our army, so it is very normal for so many people to help us to give them to us.
On the other hand, on the Kuomintang side, we all know that Chiang Kai-shek's initiation of a civil war has gone against the wishes of the majority of the people in the country. And the party he represents is against the big landlord class of big capital and the masses of the people. In peacetime, the requirements for the people are also very strict, the taxes are serious, and the prices are soaring. By 1948, confidence had almost been lost. In this battle, the Kuomintang seems to have 800,000 elite troops, but many soldiers may have come from the capture of Zhuang Ding, and the willingness to fight is not very strong.
Not only the Huaihai Campaign, but also the War of Liberation, we can find that in fact, the real casualties inflicted by our army on the Kuomintang army were not particularly numerous, and most of the Kuomintang troops still came to our army in the form of surrender, uprising, and surrender.
From the period of the Red Army to the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, to the War of Liberation, and even to the later War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, it can be seen that our army has always been able to maintain a very high degree of discipline in battle. I think this is also a very important factor that the Kuomintang army lacks, many Kuomintang troops have poor military discipline in peacetime, and there are no particularly strict requirements for soldiers, and many soldiers' combat quality is not strong enough, and it is easy to give up surrender or retreat because of a little setback. From the commander's point of view, many commanders did not exert the power of their command when commanding battles, and Chiang Kai-shek repeatedly crossed the command in many military operations, and his generals also dared not speak out.
Many of the correct decisions made by his generals were denied by Chiang Kai-shek. For example, in the Battle of Huaihai, In order to achieve his strategic goals, Du Yuming even took the initiative to turn off the radio, in order to avoid Chiang Kai-shek's intervention. However, Chiang Kai-shek did not think that he would move, and actually sent his air force to airdrop instructions to Du Yuming's troop positions, which also made Du Yuming cry and laugh.
Let's go back to the veteran's memories. Veterans said that in fact, the most important victory factor of the PLA is the number of people, which should be strictly speaking the number of local people, that is, the number of people who enter a battle, not the number of people in the overall battle. Our army is often able to form a short period of time to fight more and fight less, because the tactical application is very appropriate. In addition, this veteran recalled that in the battlefield of the Huaihai Campaign at that time, the Kuomintang troops saw the Platon Army charging at the Nationalist position without a life, and before the battle was already afraid of three points, the battle soon broke through their own defensive bottom line, and many people did not have time to react, and the PLA broke through the position and raised their hands to surrender. The veteran also said that when they saw the PLA soldiers rushing forward one by one without sacrificing, and one by one the compatriots fell under the muzzle of their guns, the psychological defense line directly collapsed, and finally had to give up.
According to this recollection of the veteran, it is actually not difficult to imagine why the enemy retreated to the island of Taiwan in just three years under such a great advantage, in fact, because he was unpopular. In fact, even if we talk about the anti-Japanese resistance, although the Kuomintang has made great contributions, if we look closely, in fact, many of the actions of the Kuomintang are also very inhumane. Like the blow-up of the Yellow River Garden Mouth in 1938, the famine in Henan in 1942, and the great rout of Yuxianggui in 1944, from these few things we can also see that the Kuomintang is actually very corrupt, and many times the ability to deal with crises is also very insufficient, many people are excessively prevaricating, there is no one who really has the ability to take responsibility, many officials are very corrupt, they are full of private pockets, they only care about their own small profits and ignore the national righteousness. All this is inseparable from Chiang Kai-shek, the ruler.
In the War of Liberation, not only on the battlefield, but also in other respects, the Kuomintang was a mess. This reminds me of the fact that the Kuomintang carried out assassination operations many times, assassinating patriotic progressives such as Wen Yiduo because they opposed the civil war, and it was very infuriating that they ended up with such a fate. In the economic aspect, due to the perennial civil war, the price of goods in the national unification area soared, and the people's living standards deteriorated. Especially in the later stages of the war, in order to prevent the collapse of the financial order, the Kuomintang issued currencies such as gold yuan coupons and silver dollar coupons, and in the end it was only a means of bullying and fooling the people, and many people even lost their homes overnight.
All in all, how can we convince such a party? On the other hand, since the drive away from Chiang Kai-shek and the founding of New China, our country can be described as moving forward step by step, from the completion of the three major transformations to the reform and opening up to the implementation of the market economic system, and then to the imminent realization of building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way, the people have dignity, live and work in peace and contentment, no longer oppressed by imperialism and power politics, and China has also become the world's second largest economy, and has a very important position in this world!
Conclusion: The victory in the Huaihai Campaign is actually a comprehensive embodiment of the gap in strength between our army and the enemy army! This strength gap does not refer to the superficial gap in so-called military data, but rather multifaceted. And a political party like the Kuomintang, no matter from what point of view we look at, its ruling power is bound to fail!