As the saying goes, a good tiger father has no dog, and at the 1955 conferment ceremony, there was such a founding general, who was not only the minister of defense, but also because of the influence of his father, his son also became a lieutenant general in our army. So who is this wonderful father?
Born in 1910 in Dazhou, Sichuan Province, Zhang Aiping entered Daxian Middle School in 1925, where he served as president of the student union and became exposed to revolutionary ideas. In 1928, Zhang Aiping became a party member and began to actively organize students and the masses to carry out revolutionary activities. In 1929, Zhang Aiping became a soldier in the Red Army and soon became the commander of the 1st Division of the Red 14th Army. After the start of the Long March, Zhang Aiping was appointed as the director of the political department of the fourth division of the Red Third Army, the political commissar of the 11th regiment, and the political commissar of the 13th regiment, and he successively commanded and participated in important battles such as Sidu Chishui, in which he led the troops to fight heroically, either becoming a vanguard or a rearguard, fully covering the strategic retreat of the main force of the Red Army, providing a huge guarantee for the victory of the main force of the Red Army in northern Shaanxi, so he soon became the political commissar and acting regiment commander of the corps.
When the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out in 1931, General Zhang Aiping served as a staff officer of the General Headquarters of the Eighth Route Army and went to East China to carry out front-line anti-Japanese work, where he actively developed anti-Japanese armed forces and established anti-Japanese base areas behind enemy lines, after which Zhang Aiping was appointed as political commissar. In commanding the anti-Japanese struggle in the Yanfu area, Zhang Aiping relied on flexible and changeable combat methods to lead the troops to successfully break through the Japanese defense line and hit the enemy army with its head in the air. In 1944, he served as the commander of the 4th Division of the Red Fourth Army and concurrently served as the commander of the Huaibei Military Region, leading the troops to fight many battles on the vast battlefields of Xuzhou, successfully recovering a large area of lost land, and making great contributions to the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan. After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, Zhang Aiping continued to work in central China, serving as the deputy commander of the Central China Military Region, because he unfortunately injured his head during the qing of the enemy troops on the Jinpu Railway, so he could only temporarily leave the army and go to the Soviet Union to heal his wounds.
In 1948, Zhang Aiping returned to China after being wounded and was soon appointed as a member of the Sanye Front, and under his command, he soon won the victory in the Battle of the Crossing River. At this time, General Zhang Aiping was assigned to be responsible for the formation of the navy, and served as the commander and political commissar of the East China Military Region, making great contributions to the composition and development of the navy. In 1955, Zhang Aiping was awarded the rank of general. After the ceremony, he continued to join the research and development team of national defense construction and weapons and equipment, and with the cooperation of General Yang Dezhi, he served as the minister of national defense for nearly 6 years from 1982.
It is worth mentioning that General Zhang Aiping has a son named Zhang Xiang, born in 1943 in Ningbo, Zhejiang, because of the influence of his father, so he was admitted to the Kazakh military industry with his own efforts, in this place he studied nuclear weapons design and manufacturing, after graduation into the Second Artillery Command, at the same time he used his outstanding professional knowledge to make outstanding contributions to the construction of China's Second Artillery Corps, and soon became the deputy commander of the Second Artillery, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general in July 2001. It can be said that the revolutionary spirit of the father continues to be carried forward.