On November 6, 1948, the Battle of Huaihai broke out. In order to fight this strategic decisive battle, Lao Jiang poured almost everything he had and threw all the elites into the battlefield, and the Nationalist army was absolutely superior in strength with 800,000 to 600,000 troops, and Du Yuming, Huang Botao, Qiu Qingquan, Hu Lian and other famous generals of the Nationalist army also all went into battle, but the result ended in a fiasco. The reason why Lao Jiang lost the Battle of Huaihai was that in addition to Huaye and Nakano fighting well, these four people within the Nationalist army were the most responsible.
The first person to be responsible is Liu Zhi. Before the Battle of Huaihai broke out, Huang Botao realized that he was in danger of being surrounded by Huaye, so he repeatedly asked Liu Zhi to retreat. However, it was not until the night of November 4 that Liu Zhi agreed to Huang Botao's retreat to Xuzhou, but ordered him to retreat with the 44th Army in the direction of Haizhou in Xin'an Town. As a result, Huang Botao waited bitterly for three days in Xin'an Town, and Hua Ye used this precious three days to catch up with Huang Botao and surround him in the area of Nianzhuang. At the beginning of the Battle of Huaihai, the Nationalist army fell into passivity.
The reason why Huang Botao was surrounded by Hua Ye was entirely due to Liu Zhi's blind command. Soon after, Du Yuming arrived in Xuzhou and proposed that while Huaye's main force was being contained by Huang Botao, he personally led Qiu Qingquan's army and Sun Yuanliang's army to meet Huang Wei's army and then fight west and Nakano, and then join forces with Huang Botao to besiege Huaye after defeating Nakano. At that time, Nakano had just transferred out of Dabie Mountain, and his heavy weapons were almost exhausted, and it was very difficult to block the attack of the enemy's three corps. However, Liu Zhi did not take Du Yuming's advice and lost this opportunity in vain. Due to his poor performance on the Huaihai battlefield, Liu Zhi did not dare to go to Taiwan after the defeat of the Nationalist army, but ran to Indonesia as a primary school teacher for many years.
The second person to be in charge is Bai Chongxi. Maybe some friends will say that Bai Chongxi did not participate in the Battle of Huaihai at all, so why should he be responsible? It is true that Bai Chongxi did not directly participate in the Battle of Huaihai, but he pulled the hind legs of old Jiang. After the collapse of Huang Botao's army, Huang Wei was also surrounded by Nakano in the double pile. In order to relieve the siege of Huang Wei's regiment, Lao Jiang ordered his concubine Song Xilian's army to go south to participate in the war. At that time, Song Xilian's corps belonged to Bai Chongxi's General Sequence of Suppression in North China, and Bai Chongxi used this as an excuse to hold the corps hostage. Old Jiang personally called Bai Chongxi and failed to mobilize a single soldier. At that time, the strength of Nakano and Huaye was almost used to the limit, and if Song Xilian's corps participated in the battle, the Huaihai Campaign would be much more difficult to fight. From this point of view, the National Army suffered a crushing defeat in the Huaihai Battlefield, and Bai Chongxi was responsible.
The third person to be in charge is Qiu Qingquan. Qiu Qingquan's main responsibility in the Huaihai Campaign was to deliberately preserve his strength and not listen to commands. In the process of being ordered to rescue Huang Botao and Huang Wei, Qiu Qingquan never really used his ace 5th Army in order to preserve his strength. Not only that, he also held the favor of Old Jiang, disobeyed the battlefield, and did not obey Du Yuming's dispatches. Qiu Qingquan's impact on this move was extremely bad, and Li Mi and Sun Yuanliang and others followed suit. After the Nationalist army retreated from Xuzhou, Li Mi's corps, which was tasked with the rear of the palace, actually ran to the front of the retreating army and became the vanguard of escape. Qiu Qingquan took the lead in not obeying the command, which was an important reason for the fiasco of the Nationalist army in the Huaihai battlefield.
The last person to be in charge was Lao Jiang. Old Chiang's own military talent is really not flattering, but he himself is not aware of this, and he is very fond of remote control command and micro-operation, and eventually buried hundreds of thousands of troops on the battlefield of Huaihai. After Huang Wei's army was surrounded by Nakano, Du Yuming thought that the general trend was gone, so he personally flew to Nanjing and suggested to Old Jiang to retreat from Xuzhou in order to preserve his strength and facilitate future operations. After consideration, Old Jiang agreed to Du Yuming's request.
However, when Du Yuming led his troops to Chen Guanzhuang, Lao Jiang changed his mind and sent someone to airdrop a handwritten letter to him: "According to the air force report, most of the enemy at the mouth of Suixi is flowing toward Yongcheng, and the brothers are still advancing towards Yongcheng on this day, so they act and sit back and watch the Yellow Corps annihilate, we will destroy the country and the species, Wangdi quickly ordered all the corps to stop advancing towards Yongcheng, turned to the attack at Suixikou, and coordinated the north-south attack of Li Yannian's corps advancing from bengbu to the north to relieve the siege of the Huang wei corps." ”
Du Yuming has been in the battlefield for a long time, and he knows that turning around and giving Huang Wei a break at this time is tantamount to a fool's dream. But he did not dare not disobey Old Chiang's orders; as early as the War of Resistance Against Japan, he returned from Savage Mountain because he obeyed Old Chiang's orders, causing huge losses to the expeditionary force. This time there was no exception, du Yuming's group had just retreated and was surrounded by Huaye who had caught up. If it were not for the blind command of old Jiang, Du Yuming's more than 200,000 people would probably have run away, and the Nationalist army would not have been completely destroyed on the Huaihai battlefield.