During the Liberation War, there were many Kuomintang generals who were captured by the People's Liberation Army.
Today we are going to discuss an interesting topic: Who was the most senior general captured by the Kuomintang during the Liberation War?
Is it Du Yuming? Is it Wang Yaowu? Is it Huang Wei? Is it Fan Hanjie? Is it Chen Changjie? Or Song Xilian? In fact, it was not, but Tang Yao, deputy commander-in-chief and chief of staff of the Kuomintang Army General Command, probably most of his friends had never heard of this person.
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Tang Yao served as chief of staff of the 32nd Group Army, chief of staff of the Rear Service Command of the Military Commission, deputy commander of the Logistics Command of the Chinese Theater and commander of the Kunming Supply District at the end of 1944; director of the Counselor's Office of the Ministry of National Defense in 1946, and chief of staff of the Army General Headquarters in 1948.
In April 1949, Nanjing was liberated. As chief of staff of the Kuomintang Army General Command, Tang Yao led the organs under his jurisdiction and the troops directly under his jurisdiction to flee from Nanjing by train to Guangzhou.
After the liberation of Guangzhou, Tang Yao fled with his troops to the Qujing area of Yunnan, and planned to run Yunnan into a base of stubborn resistance. In December of the same year, Lu Han led an uprising, and Tang Yao was appointed deputy commander-in-chief and chief of staff of the army to supervise the military and political affairs of Yunnan.
In order to completely annihilate Tang Yao's corps in the southern Yunnan region and quickly cut off Tang Yao's land and air escape route, Erye played a set of combined punches: on the one hand, the forty-ninth division of the Fifth Corps that rushed to Kunming was temporarily stopped advancing, which was to paralyze Tang Yao.
On the other hand, the 151st Division and the 114th Division of the 4th Ande 38th Army stationed in Baise were ordered to advance covertly toward the nearby Yunnan-Vietnamese border, occupy the estuary and Jinping line, and block the enemy's way to flee to Vietnam along the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, the purpose of this action was to cut off Tang Yao's escape route.
On the third hand, the main force of the Thirteenth Army of the Fourth Corps was ordered to advance from the Nanning area to Mongolia, and in coordination with the "border columns" detachments fighting guerrillas in southern Yunnan, they annihilated the enemy with lightning speed. This is the real purpose, to attack and occupy the Airport of Mongolia and annihilate Tang Yao in one fell swoop!
In order to arrive at mengzi airfield in time and block the enemy's air escape route, the Thirty-seventh Division of the Thirteenth Army traveled day and night, rushing toward Yunnan at an astonishing marching speed, marching 2,000 miles in 14 days and nights.
In the early morning of January 15, the main force of the 37th Division of the People's Liberation Army entered the mountainous area east of Mengzi, which was only 80 miles away from Mengzi City. According to the reactions of fellow villagers who had escaped from Mengzi City, the Twenty-sixth Army of Tang Yao's Corps had all been assembled in Mengzi; the enemy's Eighth Army had also moved closer to Mengzi from afar; the enemy leaders Li Mi and Yu Chengwan had fled by plane; and were now airlifting enemy family members to Taiwan.
At the same time, the reconnaissance detachment of our army also found that the singing vultures 80 miles east of Mengzi City were carrying an enemy vigilance regiment.
Synthesizing all kinds of information, we can clearly see that the enemy is trying to block the advance of our army with a part of its strength, so that its main force can buy time to escape from the air.
Relying on an accurate judgment of the enemy's situation, the PLA not only successfully destroyed the Mengzi airfield, destroyed all the planes in the airport, and completely cut off the enemy's air retreat, but also successfully surrounded the remnants of Tang Yao.
Interestingly, when Tang Yao was captured, he was drinking with other officials, celebrating that he would be able to escape early tomorrow morning.
Tang Yao was very surprised to see the People's Liberation Army like a heavenly divine soldier, and he couldn't even think of how fast the PEOPLE's Liberation Army was marching!
When he was captured, Tang Yao said something like this, "I couldn't imagine that according to the marching principle of Chinese and foreign armies, infantry normally travel less than a hundred miles a day, but ... But you violated the principle of marching and advanced more than 200 miles a day, and I did not expect you to come so quickly. ”
To some extent, it was Tang Yao's own light enemy and paralysis that made him the deputy commander-in-chief and chief of staff of the Kuomintang army, the supreme Kuomintang general who was captured alive during the Liberation War.
More importantly, capturing Tang Yao alive meant that Chiang Kai-shek's last corps left on the mainland was annihilated. After the war, the 110th Regiment was awarded the pennant of "Tang Yao, the Head of the Bandits".