At the beginning of July 1948, the Sixth Column of the Central Plains Field Army, the 12th Brigade of the Southern Shaanxi Military Region, the 28th Brigade of the Tongbai Military Region, and the Independent Regiment jointly launched a powerful offensive against the enemy, and on July 7, xiangyang was tightly surrounded, and the Battle of Xiangyang, which is famous for its military history, was launched.
Xiangyang's terrain is dangerous, easy to defend and difficult to attack, and it is known as "iron to hit Xiangyang", so it has become the hub of the enemy's "Hanshui Defense Line". Capturing it will not only cause the total collapse of the enemy's "Hanshui Defense Line," but also create conditions for our army to completely liberate the Central Plains and further break through the enemy's "Yangtze River Defense Line" and "Dabashan Defense Line" and seize forward bases.
The enemy is obviously well aware of this. Kang Ze, the leader of the special agents, drove his elite unit 104th Brigade to set up a position on a string of large mountains south of the city, such as Hutou Mountain, Cross Mountain, Yangya Mountain, and Da Nang Mountain, in a vain attempt to take advantage of the danger to block our army's capture of the mountain and attack the city.
Around Xiangyang, it is impossible to count how many enemy fortifications and bunkers there are. At the beginning, our army still used the old way of fighting, preparing to seize the mountains in the south first, and then break the city and annihilate the enemy.
However, after our army seized the positions of Wanshan, Dashantou, Double-backed Liangzi, Iron Hat Mountain, and Phoenix Mountain on the outskirts, and then advanced forward, it was blocked by the enemy by risk and stagnated. The troops attacking Crucifixion Mountain, GuanShan, and Wenbi Peak were unsuccessful in two nights of continuous fighting.
Wang Jinshan, a famous general of a generation and commander of the column, thought bitterly for a long time, and suddenly slapped the table and said, "Alas! If our army wants to seize these mountains one by one, it will not only pay too much price, but also delay time and delay the fighters! ”
He believed that the correct tactic was to send a force to detour to Dongguan, coordinate with the troops that were about to break through to Xiguan, and attack the enemy in the city from east to west.
Wang Jinshan told the generals: "Since ancient times, when xiangyang was fought, it was all about taking the mountain first and then attacking the city, and now we have to break this routine and only take a few hills." The siege began. Let's make it a 'tiger digging its heart' and leave it alone with the main enemy positions such as The Mountain of Crosses and the Hutou Mountain.
"It is estimated that when our army attacked the city, the enemy on the mountain did not dare to leave the fortifications and come down the mountain to attack us, and its firepower on the mountain could not hit us, so let it watch our army attack the city, and ask Kang Ze to carry those mountains as a burden!"
The next day, a new battle plan was formed: the main force of our army gave up the attack on hutou mountain, cross mountain, da nang mountain and other major mountains, and only prepared to seize the two small hills of Pipa Mountain and Zhenwu Mountain, which were the western barriers of the city, and the Iron Buddha Temple outside the west gate. The above three points are the three "passes" from the west to the siege. Our army must first split these three levels, seize a passage, and then break through the west gate.
The Seventeenth Brigade was sent to the west to "slash three passes", and the Eighteenth Brigade took on any task of detouring from the east; the Twelfth Brigade in southern Shaanxi and the troops of the Tongbai Military Region continued to storm Fenghuang Mountain, Wenbi Peak, Guanshan and other places to confuse and suppress the enemy.
At dusk on the 9th, the southeast corner suddenly sounded a fierce gunshot. The enemy only cares about dealing with the southeast, and who would have thought that the spearhead of our army's main attack is in the west! The 7th Company of the 2nd Battalion of the Forty-ninth Regiment was surprised, and it took only 15 minutes to capture Pipa Mountain, successfully splitting the first pass.
The next night, the 2nd Battalion of the Forty-ninth Regiment, supported by fire from the Position of Pipa Mountain, launched an attack on Mount Zhenwu. It only took more than 20 minutes to destroy 18 enemy bunkers in a row, and successfully broke through the second level.
On the evening of the 13th, the Fifty Regiment annihilated the defenders of a battalion of the Tiefo Temple in one fell swoop, pulled out the last nail on the road of attack, and our army directly approached the city of Xiangyang.
This series of swift and unconcealed actions made the enemy dizzy, and Kang Ze was busy evacuating all the enemy's 164th Brigade defending Fancheng through Hanshui and strengthening the defense of Xiangyang City, while abandoning the Nanshan position and withdrawing his troops into the city overnight.
On the afternoon of the 15th, the time for the siege came. Artillery of various calibers and more than a hundred light and heavy machine guns opened fire at the same time, and within a few hundred meters of the city wall left and right of the west gate, it was completely turned into a fire dragon, and the enemy's bunkers and fire points flew into the sky one by one.
As soon as the artillery fire extended, the battle heroes Li Fake, Feng Jilin, and Yue Faqing first took a human ladder and climbed the city from the blast opening at the side of the Ximen City Tower.
The enemy concentrated a large number of troops to frantically counterattack the breakthrough. The brave and tenacious soldiers of our army fought the enemy to the death with bundles of grenades and bayonets, repelled the enemy many times, and consolidated the breakthrough.
When the enemy's 19th counterattack was repulsed, the soldiers of the Fiftieth Regiment, the Eighteenth Brigade, the Twelfth Brigade of southern Shaanxi, and the Twenty-eighth Brigade of the Tongbai Military Region of our Seventeenth Brigade shouted and shot, like a fierce wind and like anger, and pounced on the enemy from different directions and pounced on the center of the ancient city.
The enemy collapsed and scurried around. Many of the bunkers that were densely packed in the center of the street had become rubble, and the remnants of the buildings that had not been destroyed had all stretched out small white flags of surrender. Hundreds of prisoners carried unbolted guns and drove out of the city in droves.
Early the next morning, the battle progressed to a narrow street in the northeast corner of the city, where Kangze's headquarters were located, and the enemy was still stubbornly resisting.
An explosives group of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of the Eighteenth Brigade, using civilian houses, quietly drilled into the root of the wall, and under the cover of artillery fire, with the cooperation of the Twelfth Brigade, the Twenty-eighth Brigade and other fraternal units, blasted open the gate with bazookas and explosives.
Suddenly, the troops poured in from all directions like a tide, occupied Kang Ze's old lair at once, first captured Guo Xunqi, deputy commander of the enemy's Fifteen Appeasement Zone, and then captured the famous secret agent leader Kang Ze.
Throughout the Xiangfan Campaign, our army won the victory of annihilating 20,000 enemy troops with a strength of 20,000 troops. At this point, the enemy's vast area north of the Huai River and the Han River was left with only a few isolated strongholds such as Nanyang and Zhengzhou, and its so-called "divisional defense" system had been completely smashed. The liberated areas of the Central Plains were rapidly connected and consolidated day by day.