The faction of the Kuomintang army was formed as early as when Sun Yat-sen relied on local warlords to establish political power, and later after several reorganizations to suppress the rebellion, the National Revolutionary Army was finally established under the unified command of the Military Commission. In fact, the first eight armies were essentially divided into eight factions, and in the subsequent Northern Expedition, various warlords accepted the incorporation of the Nationalist government, which made the already complicated factional environment more complicated.
In the warlord melee, Chiang Kai-shek defeated various other powerful factions and became a leading figure who held the military and political power of the whole country. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek's limited strength, coupled with the Red Army's revolution throughout the country and Japan's gradual encroachment on China, had to rely on these warlords who were nominally submissive to the central government to maintain the status quo in order to maintain his rule. After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the big factions still included Li Zongren and Yan Xishan, and other small factions such as Ma Bufang, Ma Hongkui, Feng Zhi'an, Liu Ruming, Liu Wenhui, and Deng Xihou were even more numerous; even Chiang Kai-shek's so-called Central Army was divided into concubines and collateral lineages, with the largest being Chen Cheng, Hu Zongnan, and Tang Enbo, and the small groups including Sun Liren, Du Yuming, Wang Yaowu, Li Mi, and so on.
The formation of these factions has caused many contradictions within the nationalist army. The concubines look down on the collateral and miscellaneous cards, and always let the miscellaneous cards act as cannon fodder when fighting. Miscellaneous cards are self-protection, do not contribute to the work, and in the same system there is a struggle for power and profit, resulting in contradictions. This has fundamentally formed a mutual distrust between the concubines and the miscellaneous cards, and the face and heart discord between the same lineage and the same lineage, thus giving the CCP the opportunity to break through each other.
For example, as the reorganized Sixty-sixth Division of the Central Army, was besieged at Yangshanji, wang Jingjiu, commander of the Second Corps in charge of command, ordered Liu Ruming's reorganized Fifty-fifth Division and the reorganized Sixty-eighth Division to rush to the rescue, but Liu Ruming's two divisions had already been attacked by the People's Liberation Army, and in order to preserve their strength and their own political capital, they nominally obeyed the order to come to the rescue, but in fact they moved slowly, sitting and watching the collapse of the entire Sixty-sixth Division. In the Battle of Kaifeng, Li Zhongxin, commander of the entire Sixty-sixth Division of the Central Concubine Lineage, the commander of the defenders, put himself with only one brigade to take charge of the defense of the whole city, and drove Liu Maoen, who had a large number of troops, out of the city as cannon fodder, and finally vanished, how could Li Zhongxin's brigade be able to hold the city? In the center of his memoirs, Liu Maoen bitterly pointed out that if Li Zhongxin could use his troops reasonably, the Kaifeng war situation might not have been so disastrous.
Another example is that the reorganized Seventy-fourth Division was besieged at Menglianggu, and because the division commander Zhang Lingfu and his colleague Li Tianxia were at odds, Li Tianxia's entire Eighty-third Division did not break the siege with all its strength, and the other two bypass divisions and the Gui Seventh Army were also just making a gesture, so that Zhang Lingfu directly asked for help from the Eighth Army and the entire Eleventh Division on the outskirts. Far from the water could not quench the near thirst, the destruction of the entire Seventy-fourth Division became a foregone conclusion. The absurd thing is that in the post-war review meeting, Li Tianxia and Huang Baitao, who were responsible, were not punished, and half a month later they were awarded the Third and Fourth Class Cloud Medals respectively. Later, under the pressure of public opinion and the relatives of the fallen soldiers, Li Tianxia was transferred to the first appeasement district attaché, and Huang Baitao was removed from his post and retained. It is too appropriate to describe these two examples of warfare by saying that "friendly troops have difficulties and do not move like mountains."
In terms of major factions, such as Yan Xishan, a Jin warlord who immediately occupied Shanxi from the Republic of China, in order to maintain territorial stability, only the central army of Nanjing was allowed to garrison troops in southern Jin, and the rest of the places were not allowed to set foot. However, Yan Xishan's own troops were insufficient, coupled with the fact that he had always ignored objective factors such as the strength of the troops, he could only be defeated one after another, and finally left a lonely city in Taiyuan and fled to Guangzhou alone. Ma Bufang and Ma Hongkui, who were entrenched in Ningxia, Qinghai, faced the orders of Hu Zongnan, director of the Xi'an Appeasement Office, who commanded the Shaanxi war situation, yang Fengyin violated the orders of Yang Fengyin, making the People's Liberation Army move freely on the battlefield of Shaanxi, and then launched a counter-offensive and occupied the whole of Shaanxi.
Unlike the stalemate in the Central Plains and the Northwest Battlefield, in the Northeast Battlefield, the Nationalist Army already had the advantage, but due to the defeat of other battlefields, the Northeast Nationalist Army was forced to stop the offensive, thus giving Lin Biao the opportunity to regroup and then carry out a counter-offensive. At this critical moment, the Nanjing Ministry of National Defense not only did not understand Du Yuming, but also sent Chen Cheng to take over the command. However, when Chen Cheng arrived in the northeast, he wantonly replaced non-civil generals and turned to supporting his own generals for reasons such as the defeat in the northeast war situation, which led to the disobedience of the original generals and the lack of prestige of the newly promoted generals, which made the war situation take a sharp turn for the worse. Chen Cheng finally ended up taking advantage of the "illness" to resign and leave the northeast in frustration. After that, Wei Lihuang, who took over the northeast, could only abandon the attack and defend, and struggled to maintain it. However, Chiang Kai-shek was not satisfied with Wei Lihuang, who was not from Huangpu, and once again replaced him with Du Yuming. How can the Nationalist army remain undefeated in the northeast?
At the end of the Liaoshen Campaign, the Battle of Huaihai was in full swing. The Third Appeasement Zone, which was discriminated against by the Central Army, first declared an uprising under the command of Zhang Kexia and He Jifeng, deputy commanders of the underground party of the CCP. Another Qiu Qingquan and others sat back and watched as Huang Botao's Seventh Corps was destroyed in The Mill and was not saved. Before the decisive battle began, two combat groups were lost, and the Kuomintang army was doomed to defeat at the beginning of the Huaihai Campaign.
Fu Zuoyi, who presided over the military and political affairs of North China, was born in the Jin Army, but he also formed a family of his own. After the fall of the Northeast Nationalist Army, Chiang Kai-shek asked Fu Zuoyi to withdraw the North China Nationalist Army south of the Yangtze River. However, Fu Zuoyi understood that his territory was in Suiyuan and Chahar, and that losing his territory was equivalent to losing his military power, and he preferred to besiege Northern China rather than go south, and Chiang Kai-shek could do nothing about it. With the liberation of Peiping, the elite that Chiang Kai-shek could rely on to fight was lost.
After the end of the three major battles, the generals of the Nationalist army were all in danger, and their morale immediately collapsed to a low point. At this critical juncture, the Kuomintang should have abandoned its former suspicions of sincere cooperation, but the faction was deeply rooted in the military, making it impossible for these generals to see the crux of the problem. After the People's Liberation Army launched the Campaign to Cross the River, the Nationalist armies fought their own "battles" and did not listen to unified command at all. The Yan troops were able to resist a little, while the miscellaneous troops "turned" all the way from the south bank of the Yangtze River to Guangdong, Fujian, and their marching speed was first-class. At the same time, the local powerful factions sitting in the southwest had already disobeyed Chiang Kai-shek's orders and had contacted the uprising. When Hu Zongnan made one last symbolic resistance in a corner of Xikang, the Nationalist government finally ended its rule on the mainland.
When Chiang Kai-shek ruled the mainland, he knew and tried to solve this problem, but history did not give him this opportunity. Instead, the CCP fulfilled him and enabled Chiang Kai-shek to complete the problem of eliminating factional strife in Taiwan, but he could never return to the mainland. Looking at the division of factions, on the one hand, it is caused by historical reasons, and on the other hand, it is the warlord ideology of local dignitaries. These so-called national armies, nominally paid by the state, were in fact used by various princes as private armies. Nominally a unified army, but in actual combat, it cannot command the headquarters, so can the "national army" be undefeated? (Source: Oriental Morning Post, Hu Bo)