After the liberation of Shanghai in 1949, Su Yu served as the director of the Committee for Attacking Taiwan, responsible for the preparations for the pre-war preparations for the attack on Taiwan. At this time, Chiang Kai-shek did not clearly understand the situation and did not wake up from the fiasco on the mainland, but stationed his last 300,000 troops in the coastal islands of Hainan Island, Taiwan Island, Zhoushan Islands and other coastal islands, hoping to use these islands to contain Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu and Zhejiang and other southeast coastal provinces, and to prepare for a counterattack after finding the right time.
Su Yu, as chairman of Chiang Kai-shek's Committee for Attacking Taiwan, was very satisfied with this arrangement, and the more Chiang Kai-shek divided his troops to guard, the more it would be conducive to our army to break through each one. When Shanghai was just liberated, Taiwan's military strength was not very strong, only seven armies of 140,000 people, and most of them were crippled troops, the structure was chaotic, the defense was weak, Su Yu initially decided to transfer eight armies of 200,000 people, ready to cross the river and island operations, liberate Taiwan. The Sanye Ninth Corps and other units began training in the Jiaodong coast, the mouth of the Yangtze River, and the Tianmu Mountains to simulate sea crossing and landing and combat in the mountainous areas of Taiwan.
Chiang Kai-shek also sensed the weakness of Taiwan's defensive deployment, and in a panic, he spent a lot of money to recruit 20,000 Japanese troops from Japan. In order to ensure that Taiwan was taken at one time, when Su Yu was assessing the combat effectiveness of the Japanese army, the combat effectiveness of one Japanese army was the top of the combat effectiveness of three Kuomintang soldiers, and Chiang Kai-shek began to capture Zhuang Ding from the southeast coast to send to Taiwan, and the defenders on the island of Taiwan had exceeded 200,000 people.
After 1950, Hainan Island was liberated, and the People's Liberation Army annihilated more than 30,000 enemy troops, but Xue Yue preserved the main naval and air force of the Kuomintang army in Hainan and withdrew more than 70,000 Kuomintang troops to Taiwan. During the Battle of Zhoushan Islands, in view of the loss of Hainan Island, the Kuomintang army withdrew all 120,000 troops from the island in order to concentrate its forces on ensuring Taiwan, bringing the number of Kuomintang troops on the island to 400,000, and sun Liren personally took charge of the reorganization and training of the troops, and the combat effectiveness of the various departments was greatly strengthened.
In the summer of 1949, Chiang Kai-shek summoned Cao Shicheng, director of the Military Attaché Department of the Chinese Delegation to Japan, and said: "Our people are striving to fight against the chaos and build the country, and the first thing is to organize and train the three armed forces to improve the quality of commanders." He instructed Cao Shicheng to secretly hire former Japanese generals to come to Taiwan to assist the Kuomintang army in reorganizing and reforming. Sun Liren, who was in charge of the training of soldiers at that time, could not accept it emotionally and did not agree with him, so Chiang Kai-shek asked Sun Liren and the INSTRUCTORs of the US Army to train a number of troops, and then let the Instructors of the Japanese Army train a number of troops, and then the troops of the two sides conducted a real-combat exercise, which ended in the victory of the troops trained by the Japanese army.
After that, Chiang Kai-shek not only recruited Japanese soldiers, but also recruited a number of Japanese instructors, and set up the "Yuanshan Officer Training Regiment" at the Dazhi camp in Taipei, with Chiang Kai-shek as the regimental commander and Sun Liren as the deputy head of the regiment. After Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, he purged the major factions in the Kuomintang army and let his eldest son Chiang Ching-kuo carry out a large-scale land reform campaign in Taiwan, so that there was no longer any factional strife within the Kuomintang on the mainland, and the contradictions among the people at the bottom of society were not so serious. These acts of Chiang Kai-shek greatly enhanced the combat effectiveness of the Kuomintang army.
Under these circumstances, Su Yu had to increase the number of troops to liberate Taiwan, and he ordered the Third Field Army to all participate in the battle, and the 12 main forces with a total of 500,000 troops were all assembled in the southeast coastal area, and four corps were transferred from other field armies as reserves, so that the total strength reached 65 people.
In order to cooperate with Su Yu's liberation of Taiwan, the People's Liberation Army Navy, and the Air Force were quickly established, Liu Yalou served as the commander of the Air Force, and Xiao Jinguang served as the commander of the Navy. By June 1950, the Air Force had two fighter regiments, one strike aircraft regiment, and one bomber regiment, each with three brigades, two fighter regiments equipped with 30 MiG-15 and La-11 fighters, 30 Il-10 fighters, and 20 Bomber regiments equipped with Tu-2 bombers.
The Navy has 92 ships of various types and 309 guns, a total of 35,000 people. The East China Military Region also set up the first airborne troops, with a total of seven battalions of snipers, tanks, mortars, and combat defense artillery, seven companies of anti-aircraft machine guns, engineers, transportation, communications, reconnaissance, guards, and automobiles, and another teaching team, totaling more than 5,000.
In addition, at that time, the state also took out 6 billion kilograms of grain as military food, which accounted for one-tenth of the country's total grain production, and Chairman Mao personally visited the Soviet Union and obtained a loan of three hundred million US dollars, of which 100 million US dollars was used to purchase naval ships and warplanes. By April 1950, the PLA did not need enough ships to cross The hayden Island, and the number of ships collected at that time had reached 1192, and the demand had increased to 2282 at this time, which was simply not enough for 500,000 troops and so much equipment to land on the island.
In June 1950, Su Yu proposed an east-west attack, both sea and air, landing simultaneously from the west coast and the east coast of Taiwan, while allowing paratroopers to parachute into the rear of the enemy and attack the enemy headquarters. But on June 25, after the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet entered kaohsiung, Taiwan, the port of Keelung, and cruised through the Taiwan Strait, forcing the liberation of Taiwan to be postponed.