On November 4, 1948, Su Yu, acting commander and acting political commissar of Huaye, Tan Zhenlin, deputy political commissar, Chen Shiyu, chief of staff, and Zhang Zhen, deputy chief of staff, issued an order to attack the Huaihai Campaign. On the 6th, Huaye's main force advanced from Linyi and Tengxian areas to the eastern section of the Longhai Line, the first column, the sixth column, and the ninth column directly attacked the Huang Baitao Corps in Xin'an Town, the fourth column, the eighth vertical southwest march, with the purpose of occupying the canal railway bridge, the seventh column, the tenth column, the eleventh vertical Taierzhuang, and the Hanzhuang march, with the purpose of eliminating feng's public security department.
When our army launched a large-scale attack on the Kuomintang army, the Kuomintang army was still in chaos. On November 4, Gu Zhutong and Liu Zhi called a meeting of the generals of the various corps in Xuzhou, and decided to change the deployment of the troops and shrink the troops around Xuzhou. At the meeting, Huang Baitao proposed to take Xuzhou as the center, gather all the corps around Xuzhou to prepare for battle, and suggested abandoning Haizhou and transferring the Third Appeasement Zone and the 44th Army to the west, and Liu Zhi agreed to his plan. On the 5th, Huang Baitao returned to Xin'an Town and arranged for the Seventh Corps to move to the vicinity of Nianzhuang on the west side of the canal.
Chiang Kai-shek had a habit of employing people, either Huangpu or Zhejiang, so that he would reuse them, but Huang Baitao was neither Huangpu nor Zhejiang, he was a Guangdong native, he had participated in the Beiyang Army, and had also participated in other warlords, and was later recruited by Chiang Kai-shek, but Huang Baitao was different from other warlords, he did not support the army and respected himself, nor was he corrupt and corrupt, and he was very loyal to Chiang Kai-shek.
At the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Huang Baitao was appointed commander of the 25th Army, which was a full miscellaneous army unit, three divisions from the Central Army, the Northeast Army, and the Sichuan Army, and the combat effectiveness was very poor, but Huang Baitao took a short time to improve the combat effectiveness of this unit. After the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the 25th Army was reorganized into the 25th Division, with Huang Baitao as the commander of the Lieutenant General's Division, and because this unit was a miscellaneous army, it was equipped with Japanese armaments, which could not be compared with Zhang Lingfu's reorganized 74th Division and other units.
When the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was just won, the generals at all levels of the Kuomintang army rushed to get money for their wives, and Huang Baitao not only did not care about these things, but even did not participate in the dance, and concentrated on training troops. During the Battle of Menglianggu and the Battle of Nanma, Although Huang Baitao's reorganized 25th Division was a miscellaneous army unit, it desperately rescued other units, causing great casualties to Huaye. In the Battle of Eastern Henan, Huang Baitao even drove his tanks forward, so that Huaye did not achieve greater results.
Huang Baitao's loyalty also impressed Chiang Kai-shek, who later ordered him to serve as the commander of the Seventh Corps of the Kuomintang Army, which had five corps under its command, namely the 63rd Army, the 64th Army, the 100th Army, and the 25th Army, and later Liu Zhi transferred the 44th Army to Huang Baitao, making this corps the largest army on the Huaihai battlefield. But the background behind these five armies is different, respectively, subordinate to the Sichuan Army, the Guangdong Department, the Central Army and other factions, Huang Baitao is not so easy to command.
On November 6, Liu Zhi assigned the 100th Army and the 44th Army to the Seventh Corps, but Liu Zhi asked the 44th Army to help transport salt in Haizhou City, making It impossible for Huang Baitao to retreat. On November 7, a security brigade in front of Huang Baitao was completely annihilated by Hua Ye, when the commander of the security brigade, Wang Hongjiu, arrived at Huang Baitao's headquarters with a rolling belt, Huang Baitao knew that the situation was already very critical, and immediately ordered the five armies and 11 divisions to retreat to the west, and the main force of the 25th, 44th, 64th, and 100th armies retreated through the Canal Bridge (river crossing sequence: 64th Army, Corps Headquarters, 44th Army, 25th Army, 100th Army), and the 63rd Army withdrew west through the Yaowan Ferry Canal to serve as a flank cover for the corps.
While waiting for the 44th Army to withdraw from Haizhou, Huang Baitao neglected a very fatal thing, that is, he forgot to build a pontoon bridge on the canal, causing the men and horses of the five armies to crowd on an iron bridge, plus there was a pursuit by the Plaster Army, and the losses were very heavy.
On November 9, the 25th Army passed the Canal Bridge under the cover of the 100th Army, and in the afternoon, Zhou Zhidao, commander of the 100th Army, ordered the 44th Army to retreat. Zhou Zhidao, commander of the 100th Army, was so angry that the officers and men of the 25th Army did not blow up the bridge, but when retreating, an ammunition truck on the east side of the bridge suddenly exploded, and the officers and men of the 25th Army thought that the People's Liberation Army had come and immediately blew up the bridge, resulting in two regiments being separated on the east bank of the canal, and these troops were annihilated by the officers and men of the Huaye Eighth Column who were chasing them.
At the same time,
Served as a flank cover for the corps
63rd Army
It was originally planned to cross the river from Kiln Bay, but the commander
Chen Zhang
Proud of the enemy, slow to move, did not cross the river until the 9th, became a lone army left by Huang Baitao's army on the east bank of the canal. Su Yu ordered the fourth column, six columns, eight columns, and nine columns to cross the river to pursue Huang Baitao's corps, and the task of annihilating the 63rd Army was entrusted to the first column.
At that time, the commander of the first column, Ye Fei, was recuperating in the rear due to illness, and Zhang Yixiang, deputy commander and chief of staff, commanded the battle, Su Yu asked him before the battle if he could kill the 63rd Army one-on-one, Zhang Yixiang replied that there was no problem, and then immediately commanded three divisions of the 20th Army to surround the 63rd Army, annihilating it all within three days, and Chen Zhang, commander of the 63rd Army, was captured.
On November 10, Huaye's 7th, 10th, and 13th columns occupied Suyangshan and attacked the west side of Nianzhuang through the defense zone of the 3rd Appeasement Zone of the Kuomintang Army. The reason why Hua Ye was able to quickly pass through the defense zone of the Third Appeasement Zone of the Kuomintang Army was because the two deputy commanders of the Third Appeasement Zone, He Jifeng and Zhang Kexia, were both underground party members, and they led the 59th Army on November 8. The 23,000 officers and men of the 77th Army revolted, causing Huaye's seven columns, ten columns, and thirteen columns to kill from behind Huang Baitao, Huaye's thirteenth column completely annihilated about 3,000 remnants of the Kuomintang 44th Division in Cao Baji, and Liu Shenghe, the commander of the 44th Division' major general, shot himself.
November 11, China
Ye completely completed the encirclement of Huang Baitao's corps, and then ordered the 4th, 6th, 8th, 9th, and 13th Columns to be responsible for encirclement and annihilation with the cooperation of the special column
Huang Baitao
corps. On the afternoon of the 11th, Liu Zhi ordered Li Mi's corps, Qiu Qingquan's corps to march eastward, to relieve the siege of Huang Baitao, huang Wei's corps to march to Fuyang, Li Yannian's 9th Appeasement District was reorganized into the Sixth Corps, Liu Ruming's Fourth Appeasement District was reorganized into the Eighth Corps, and Sun Yuanliang's 16th Corps also began to act.
It was also on this day that an unprecedented decisive battle between the Kuomintang and the Communists, later the Battle of Huaihai, was fully launched in the Central Plains. Xuzhou suppressed a total of 800,000 troops from seven corps and other directly subordinate units here, and was much stronger than the People's Liberation Army in terms of equipment, and Chiang Kai-shek hoped that Huang Baitao would be able to hold on to the mill and buy time for Qiu Qingquan and Li Mi to attack Huaye inside and outside.
After seeing so many Kuomintang troops, Su Yu still did not change his determination to annihilate Huang Baitao's corps, and began to adjust the deployment, ordering the seventh column, the tenth column, and the eleventh column of the Shandong Corps to block Qiu Qingquan's corps and Li Mi's corps, and ordered the second column, the twelfth column, and the eleventh column of the Northern Jiangsu Corps to cut off the retreat of Xuzhou's aid to the enemy.
Huaye's four columns, six columns, eight columns, nine columns, and thirteen columns continued to encircle Nianzhuang, and under the unified command of Huaye's chief of staff, Chen Shiyu, annihilated the enemy of Nianzhuang. At that time, Su Yu did not pay too much attention to Huang Baitao, he thought that in addition to the 100th Army, these troops were all miscellaneous troops, and five days should be enough, but what he did not expect was that this battle was fought for more than ten days, and the first battle of the Huaihai Campaign almost broke the front teeth.
After Huang Baitao arrived at Nianzhuang, Li Mi's corps had been stationed here and built many fortifications here, and Huang Baitao had strengthened on the basis of these fortifications, and the deployment and fortification of one village after another had formed a huge ring of fortifications, and a large number of alphabet forts and light and dark fire points had been built.
In the three days after the battle began, only the 6th and 9th columns of Huaye made some progress, but only a few villages were occupied, and the other troops and Huang Baitao's corps fell into a stalemate. By the 15th, Huaye's artillery unit had fired three base shells, but still did not make much progress.
Su Yu saw that there was no progress on the front line, and the reinforcements of the Kuomintang army were still coming to reinforcements, so he immediately summoned the main generals of Huaye and the commanders of various columns to a meeting, and Su Yu instructed that they should first fight the weak enemy, then fight the strong enemy, attack their leaders, and disrupt their command, and let Tan Zhenlin and Wang Jian'an unify their command of all the troops participating in the Battle of Nianzhuang.
The troops who attacked the fortified areas fought fiercely, and the units that blocked the attack were not much better; the Kuomintang army sent a large number of air force units to bombard the positions of the reinforcements, and Du Yuming personally went to Li Mi's corps to supervise the battle, and the casualties of huaye's tenth column, eleventh column, and other units were very heavy. On the 19th, Hua Ye concentrated hundreds of heavy artillery to carry out a fierce bombardment of the mill, and when the Ninth Column attacked to the south, the enemy placed more than 20 light and heavy machine guns behind a small bridge in the trench outside the South Gate, and the soldiers of the Ninth Column were knocked down on the bridge in rows during the charge.
Nie Fengzhi, commander of the Ninth Column, went to the front line to command the column artillery to strike at it, which bought time for the main attack regiment of the charge to break through. Because the casualties were too large, there were not enough soldiers sent from the rear, in order to replenish the soldiers, Huaye invented the "that is, prisoners and replenishment" when he was milling zhuangzhuang, and some of the captured nationalist troops, without even changing their clothes, took Huaye's hat and went back to the battlefield. Some of the main offensive regiments on the front line, except for a few cadres such as regimental commanders, who were not prisoners of the Kuomintang soldiers, were basically Kuomintang soldiers.
The Battle of Nianzhuang lasted from November 6 to November 22, and in 17 days, Huaye killed and wounded more than 60,000 Kuomintang troops, but Huaye also paid the price of 60,000 casualties, and later the three regiments of the Kuomintang army that fought Chen Guanzhuang had more than 300,000 people, and there were not so many casualties. After the battle, at least 5,000 casualties were inflicted on the various columns in Huaye, the backbone of the battle was basically exhausted, and many companies were left with more than ten people, and these ten or so people were basically logisticians.