In the War of Liberation, Dongye had twelve columns and a million troops, so where did so many troops come from?
In 1945, at the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China held in Yan'an, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China predictably pointed out the importance of seizing the northeast. After Japan's surrender, during Chairman Mao's negotiations in Chongqing, Liu Shaoqi's "development to the north and defense to the south" became the programmatic policy for the future development of the Communist Party, so the central authorities successively transferred the troops from the south to the north, and extracted the essence of the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army and marched northeast.
These troops mainly include: 60,000 people from the Shandong Military Region, 32,000 from the Huang Kecheng Department of the Third Division of the New Fourth Army, 3,000 from the 359th Brigade's left-behind detachment, and troops transferred from Jin-Cha-Ji and other regions, totaling 110,000 people, and 20,000 political work cadres, who have taken the form of land or sea transportation, such as Luo Ronghuan, commander of the Shandong Military Region, who arrived in Liaoning by steamboat.
Thus, by the beginning of 1946, the entire northeast had gathered the quintessence of the whole army during the War of Resistance Against Japan, including Military cadres such as Lin Biao, Luo Ronghuan, Xiao Jinguang, Huang Kecheng, and Xiao Ke, as well as senior leaders such as Peng Zhen, Chen Yun, Gao Gang, Zhang Wentian, and Li Fuchun.
The first Communist army to enter Shenyang was a thousand people led by Zeng Kelin, and due to the constraints of the Soviet side, they broke through Shanhaiguan under the banner of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Coalition Army and the Volunteer Army, and then began a crazy expansion of the army, and in just one month, they had 30,000 new soldiers, which was called divine speed. Before the Kuomintang threw the main force of the southwest rear to the northeast through AMERICAN aircraft, the Communist army had more than doubled!
By the end of 1946, Dongye already had three large base areas in Northern Manchuria, Western Manchuria, and Southern Manchuria, with a total number of more than 400,000 troops, which was almost the same as the troops airlifted by the Kuomintang, but the equipment was not as good as the other side.
After entering the strategic counteroffensive, Higashino had a new source of expansion, that is, prisoners of the Kuomintang army. In the early days, the main forces of the nationalist army were all elites who came down from the expeditionary force or the battlefield of Yunnan and Burma, and their tactical quality was very high, and after being captured by our army, they could greatly promote the tactical level of their classmates and even the same company, especially the artillery, and their performance was extremely outstanding in the battles of Dehui and Xiushuihezi.
In addition to "capturing and replenishing," the Northeast Military Region has also taken the reorganization and training of the reserve army as an important way to supplement the troops. On July 27, 1947, the Northeast Bureau adopted Luo Ronghuan's suggestion and began to form a second-line corps to solve the problem of the source of troops. That is, the reorganization and training of independent regiments with regiments as the structure of the new recruits, each regiment quota of 2500 people, in just over a month into 48 independent regiments with a total of 120,000 people, that is, the first phase of the reserve army, by the end of the rectification work in February 1948, as many as 220,000 troops had been added.
As a result of the above three major measures, by the time it reached Jinzhou, the Northeast Field Army had exceeded a million people, twice as many as the combined forces of the Kuomintang isolated in Shenyang, Changchun, and Jinzhou, and had a considerable number of heavy weapons corps. Later, Dongye entered the Guanguan to fight the Pingjin Campaign, a total of more than 700,000 combat troops, plus 150,000 former migrant workers; and then completed the southern line of the large pursuit of as many as 880,000 troops, which is definitely the peak that can appear on a single battlefield.