During the Liberation War, in the Kuomintang army at that time, the factions were already very clearly divided, like the 74th Army, the 18th Army, the Fifth Army, the five main forces, the generals were mainly Huangpusheng, the combat effectiveness was strong, the weapons and equipment were also very good, but other miscellaneous troops, whether it was weapons and equipment or the replenishment of soldiers, were seriously in short supply, even if these miscellaneous army units were eliminated by the People's Liberation Army, Chiang Kai-shek would not have half a heartache.
However, among the many Kuomintang generals, there is a miscellaneous army general who is different, although he is a general of the miscellaneous army, he can be appreciated by Chiang Kai-shek, and he is a man who rises in the clouds and soars, and this person is Huang Baitao.
A tough general in the Miscellaneous Army
Huang Baitao's early resume is very confusing, his ancestral home is in Guangdong, born in Tianjin. When he was young, Huang Baitao served under the Beiyang warlord Li Chun, the overseer of Jiangsu, and Huang Baitao was low-key and cautious, and won Li Chun's trust, after which Li Chun sent him
The Jinling Officers' Teaching Corps studied in the fifth period, and after graduation, he served as a platoon leader, company commander and other positions.
Later, When Zhang Zongchang attacked Jiangsu, Huang Baitao's troops were also incorporated into Zhang Zongchang's troops, from company commander and battalion commander to brigade commander. In 1928, he was the commander of the Sixth Army under Zhang Zongchang
Xu Yuanquan led his troops to Chiang Kai-shek, and Huang Baitao was promoted to commander of the 41st Division.
Chiang Kai-shek had a habit of employing people, either graduating from the Whampoa Military Academy, the Baoding Military Academy, the Japanese Army University, and the Japanese Army Non-Commissioned Officer School, or they had to be Zhejiang.
Huang Baitao's experience can be said to be a miscellaneous card in the miscellaneous army, and naturally it will not be valued by Chiang Kai-shek.
In order to divide and disintegrate these miscellaneous army units and deprive these miscellaneous army generals of their military power, Chiang Kai-shek will send them to the army university to study, nominally to let them further their studies.
But only generals trusted by Chiang Kai-shek, after they graduated, would be reassigned to various units and take over military power. Huang Baitao, a miscellaneous military general, naturally had no military power after he went to military school.
After graduating from the third phase of the Army University, Huang Baitao was transferred to the Central Military Commission as a lieutenant general and senior staff, which is actually a fictitious position, and perhaps Huang Baitao will not have the opportunity to regain military power in this life. However, during his time at the Central Military Commission, a military treatise he wrote attracted the attention of He Yingqin, and after the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, He Yingqin sent him to Gu Zhutong's Third Theater of Operations as chief of staff.
Huang Baitao knows that he has no background, no backer, and he can only work hard step by step if he wants to go up. Therefore, he was very diligent when he was chief of staff in the Third Theater, so he was also appreciated by Gu Zhutong. At the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Huang Baitao was sent by Gu Zhutong to the 25th Army as a commander and regained military power.
The 25th Army was a newly formed unit at that time, and the three divisions under its jurisdiction originally belonged to the three systems of the Central Army, the Sichuan Army, and the Northeast Army. but
After Huang Baitao took office, he immediately carried out drastic reforms, straightened out military discipline, punished corrupt officials, and strengthened the training status of the troops, so that the combat effectiveness of the troops was rapidly enhanced.
Huang Baitao also often personally went down to the army to train with soldiers at the grass-roots level, so the officers and men of this unit were very loyal to Huang Baitao. The 25th Army also attached great importance to night combat, close combat, and the ability of white-knife fighting was very strong, which was rare in the Kuomintang army at that time.
Hua Ye had a headache as a general
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the generals at all levels in the Kuomintang took advantage of the opportunity to amass wealth one after another, and generally adhered to the concept of "five sons and dengkes", that is, gold, tickets, cars, houses, and women, which brought heavy disasters to the common people, and the combat effectiveness of the various units of the Kuomintang army also declined sharply.
But Huang Baitao is different, he does not prostitute, does not gamble, is not greedy, is not corrupt, does not smoke, still rooted in the army every day, and does not even participate in the most ordinary social dances. Some people also advised Huang Baitao to exchange more feelings with some of the upper-level generals of the Kuomintang, but Huang Baitao said:
"Our troubles have not been removed, and it is not the time for singing and dancing. I don't believe in dancing all night, and the next day the spirit of doing things is not affected. Even if others say I'm stubborn, I can't change that
。 ”
In 1946, Chiang Kai-shek reorganized the Kuomintang troops throughout the country, the 25th Army was reorganized into the 25th Division, and Huang Baitao served as the commander of the Lieutenant General's Division, this unit was all-Japanese armament, and the 74th Division, the 11th Division, which was a unit with all-American armament and equipment, could not be compared, and its fame was incomparable with these units.
At the beginning of the Liberation War, some generals in Huaye did not pay attention to this unit, but after a long time, they found that this miscellaneous army unit was even more difficult to deal with than some ace units of the Kuomintang army. In the 1946 Battle of the Seven Wars and Seven Victories of the Soviet Union, although Huang Baitao was also defeated by Su Yu's men, his troops were the Kuomintang troops with the smallest losses.
In the Battle of Menglianggu in 1947, Zhang Lingfu's reorganized 74th Division was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of troops in Huaye, while the Kuomintang army was full of factions that wanted to maintain their strength and stopped moving forward, but Huang Baitao led the reorganized 25th Division to fight to the death. Su Yu did not pay attention to this early army unit at that time, and only let YiZhong use a division to block Huang Baitao, and the others all attacked Meng Lianggu.
As a result, the division that was responsible for blocking the attack was almost completely destroyed, and if it were not for a unit of the fourth column passing through Tianma Mountain, Huang Baitao would probably have rescued Zhang Lingfu.
In the Battle of Nanma in July 1947, Su Yu concentrated four columns to besiege Hu Lian's reorganized 11th Division, one of the five main forces, and it was Huang Baitao who reinforced regardless of casualties, and finally successfully broke through the Huaye blocking force and rescued Hu Lian. After the Battle of Nanma, Su Yu immediately launched the Battle of Linqu, but due to the turmoil of Huang Baitao and others, he once again returned without success.
The two battles of Nanma Linqu, because of Huang Baitao's desperate reinforcements, caused great casualties to HuaYe.
Comrade Cheng Jun, a member of the Seventh Column of Huaye, was hit by the special shooters of the entire 25th Division and was seriously injured. Hua Ye not only ran out of ammunition captured during the Battle of Menglianggu, but also lost the Yimeng Mountain base area.
Su Yu later criticized the 7th Column of Huaye and the 3 regiments of the local armed forces and the Bohai Naval Region that were aiding: "I
The troops we were fighting for were not very strong, and even under the equal strength of the enemy and us, they could not stop him (Huang Baitao)."
The Battle of Eastern Henan in 1948 was actually equivalent to the rehearsal of the Battle of Huaihai, which was fought quite beautifully, but because of Huang Baitao's troublemaking, the third phase of the Battle of Eastern Henan did not draw a satisfactory end. After being surrounded, Huang Baitao personally drove a tank charge to block Huaye's attack, and when he counterattacked, he also led his troops to pursue all the way to the yellow river, and Huaye was captured by more than 3,000 people.
Huang Baitao's efforts were also recognized by Chiang Kai-shek, and before the Battle of Huaihai, Huang Baitao was promoted to commander of the Seventh Corps. The Seventh Corps has five corps under its jurisdiction, namely the 25th Army, the 44th Army, the 63rd Army, the 64th Army, and the 100th Army, which is also the largest corps of the Nationalist Army during the Huaihai Campaign, but among these five armies, except for the 100th Army, the others are miscellaneous army units.
The first stage of the Huaihai Campaign was to annihilate Huang Baitao's Seventh Corps.
At that time, Su Yu considered that the main composition of this army was a miscellaneous army, and felt that it could be completely annihilated in five days. But Hua Ye and the Seventh Corps fought bloodily for three days, and neither of them took a step forward, and only mastered a few insignificant villages.
At that time, Du Yuming also believed that Huang Baitao could withstand Hua Ye's attack for seven days at most, so he only asked him to block for seven days, and after seven days, the reinforcements of Li Mi's corps and Qiu Qingquan's corps would arrive.
However, Huang Baitao fought with HuaYe for 12 days on the undefendable plain, which made Huaye fight thrillingly in the first phase of the battle. After the end of the Battle of Nianzhuang, Huang Baitao and Yang Tingyan, deputy commander of the 25th Army, rushed out, seriously wounded and committed suicide. In the Battle of Huaihai, only two corps commanders of the Nationalist army committed suicide, one was Huang Baitao and the other was Qiu Qingquan, and even Du Yuming and Huang Wei, the most trusted disciples of Chiang Kai-shek, did not choose to commit suicide.
After Huang Baitao committed suicide, the Nationalist government posthumously awarded him a second-class general in the army, and Chiang Kai-shek also issued him a pension of 100,000 gold yuan coupons, but the money, in Shanghai at that time, was only enough to buy a burnt cake. Because he was a clean official during his reign and did not have much savings, after his death, his family's life was also very poor.