【Forgotten War】
On a cold night in December 1966, Yang Shuzhen and Zheng Ruodu said goodbye as usual at the Beijing railway station. As a military sister-in-law, Yang Shuzhen understands that her husband must obey the dispatch of the army, and in the past 6 years of marriage, she has long been accustomed to the days of gathering less and leaving more.
It was getting late, and she was completely unaware of her husband's abnormality.
Soon after, Yang Shuzhen received a letter from Guangxi, and she was a little uneasy in her heart, although there were also transfers in previous years, but she would not run so far.
She suddenly remembered that there were several gatherings in Tiananmen Square last year in solidarity with Vietnam, and Guangxi was so close to Vietnam, her husband would not go to war, right?
As a military subordinate, Yang Shuzhen is also familiar with the military's secrecy system. Thinking about it, although she was very worried, she was not good enough to inquire. After inquiring, she knew that the climate on the border of Guangxi was hot and humid, so she made two pairs of shorts for her husband and bought a box of chocolate candy to send it over.
What she never expected was that this correspondence would become a farewell.
In March 1967, the US military dispatched hundreds of planes to carry out indiscriminate bombardment of the Vietnamese city of Taiyuan, where the Chinese aid forces were stationed, and Zheng Ruodu's anti-aircraft artillery detachment 62 rose up to fight back, although 18 US planes were shot down, but the army also suffered great sacrifices.
Zheng Ruodu became a martyr. Since China's aid to Vietnam was not made public at that time, the remains of the martyrs could not be returned to China. For forty years, on every husband's day, Yang Shuzhen has to go to the Monument to the People's Heroes in Beijing to present a bouquet of flowers.
Because she really didn't know where her husband was buried, even if she wanted to pay tribute, she couldn't find a tombstone.
During the entire period of aiding Vietnam to resist the United States, there were 1,446 martyrs like Zheng Duruo who buried their bones in foreign countries, and they were buried in 57 cemeteries in Vietnam, separated from their families.
Such a human tragedy is heart-wrenching enough, but what is even more tragic is that the Chinese people have generally lost their memory of the war.
As Vietnam began to take the pro-Soviet route after 1975, constantly creating incidents on the border, which eventually led to the self-defense counterattack that shocked the world in 1979, Chinese's favorability for Vietnam also fell to a freezing point.
A line in the movie "Garland Under the Mountain" is very representative of the views of most Chinese people: more than 20 billion yuan of aid has raised a white-eyed wolf.
Phoenix TV once concluded in the documentary "17° North Latitude": "This is a war that is not worth the loss... China paid $20 billion in aid and thousands of sacrifices, but in exchange for a worse living environment, the encirclement of the Soviets and Vietnamese, and later a self-defense counterattack. ”
Since the founding of New China, it has successively supported Korea and Vietnam in driving out the US aggressors, and has launched four self-defense counterattacks in China and India, Zhenbao Island, Paracel Islands, and China and Vietnam according to changes in the current situation.
Today, the Internet has set off a huge public opinion climax to eliminate historical nihilism, and the heroic stories of various eras have been deeply excavated and widely recognized, but the aid to Vietnam and the War against the United States is still a blank.
In fact, it is reasonable to have such a situation: the logic of Internet content production is to do what it likes, if the netizens do not recognize a thing high, then naturally no one is willing to go to the hot face to paste the cold ass.
This has caused the history of aiding Vietnam to resist the United States to be buried deeper and deeper.
From the perspective of scale, 320,000 troops have been dispatched to aid vietnam and resist the United States, with a time span of up to 8 years, involving many arms such as air defense, engineering, mine clearance, logistics, etc., sacrificing 1446 people, and the number of wounded fighters is countless.
It is hard to imagine that military aid operations of this magnitude, in just over half a century, have been so thoroughly forgotten in the memory of the crowd.
【Guarding 17°N】
Unlike the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, aiding Vietnam to resist the United States was an indirect war, and the PLA did not directly participate in the war, but was only responsible for ensuring North Vietnam's sea and air defense and logistics transportation lines, and its fundamental purpose was to defend the 17° north latitude line.
This line is the provisional military demarcation line delineated in the 1954 Geneva Agreement, and China has played a leading role in promoting the signing of the agreement, so this line has become China's bottom line.
Once this line is crossed, it will be another war to resist US aggression and aid Korea. In the 1960s, China's relations with the United States and the Soviet Union had fallen to a freezing point, and if a war began, it was possible to face a situation in which the north and south were to confront the two hegemons at the same time, which was obviously unbearable.
For the new China, holding the 17° north latitude line at the lowest cost is the best solution to the Vietnamese problem.
As a sea power country, the US military has great naval and air superiority, so the focus of aiding Vietnam in resisting the United States is coastal defense and defense in depth.
Let's start with coastal defense.
Vietnam has a narrow coastline of 3,260 kilometers, and the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, is only 100 kilometers away from haiphong port, which is simply an ideal battlefield for the US fleet. After Johnson succeeded to the presidency in 1963, the top level of the US military repeatedly proposed landing in Coastal Defense to take the key points and end the war.
On Labor Day, May 1, 1965, China officially put forward the slogan of "Aiding Vietnam to Resist the United States", and the first thing involved in the Vietnam War was to send engineers to coastal defense ports to build fortifications on 15 islands and 8 coastal defense points.
Under the nose of the US reconnaissance plane, the engineers installed the artillery in place in only 12 days, and by the time the enemy reacted, coastal defense had become an impenetrable fortress.
Seeing such a scene, Saigon mistakenly thought that China had entered the war, and commented: "The Chinese volunteer army marched into north Vietnam, stationed in the northeast archipelago, and took over the defense of the islands and coasts of North Vietnam. ”
Let's talk about defense-in-depth.
During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military dropped more than 8 million tons of various bombs on Vietnamese territory, four times more than the sum of World War II. This may be more abstract, but let's take an example: in November 1965, the Chinese Engineer Corps built an Amphi airport in Vietnam, and the US military used 4859 aircraft to bomb this strategic target.
The U.S. military industry made rapid progress in the 1960s and 1970s, and they developed a lot of new explosives, a new type of bomb landed on the ground, which could blow up a large pit with a diameter of 60 meters, and could hardly survive within a radius of 100 meters.
In this case, without China's help, even if the US military does not cross the 17° line, the bomb alone can blow up North Vietnam.
Since 1965, China has not only sent engineering teams and railway troops to help Vietnam repair communication lines, but also sent five groups of anti-aircraft artillery units to directly participate in air defense.
In the four years of combat, the anti-aircraft artillery unit shot down 1,707 enemy planes and wounded 1,608, and 676 soldiers died heroically, accounting for half of the total number of people who died in aiding Vietnam and resisting the United States.
Throughout the Vietnam War, the US military did not dare to cross the 17° line, on the one hand, because of the restrictions of the Geneva Agreement, on the other hand, because of China's determination in North Vietnam to "how much you blow up and I repair as much as I repair", which made the United States afraid and did not dare to cross the minefield for half a step.
【Three Strategic Significance】
Many people may ask, what is the significance of the sacrifice we have made to help Vietnam and resist the United States?
To sum up, there are the following three points.
First, to avoid direct U.S. and Soviet control of Vietnam.
China in the 1960s, with the Soviet Union in the north, India in the southwest, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in the east, was blockaded on all sides, leaving only breathing space in the direction of Southeast Asia. Moreover, Vietnam is taking most of China's South China Sea, and no matter which side it falls into the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, the consequences are very serious.
Falling into the hands of the United States, the blockade chain of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam will form a closed loop, and all channels for China's external development through the sea route will be blocked.
Falling into the hands of the Soviet Union, when China and the Soviet Union had already turned against each other, the Soviet Union was bound to support Vietnam to dominate Southeast Asia, and when it was attacked by the two hegemons of the north and south, the situation would also be very passive.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of aiding Vietnam and resisting the United States is not to defeat the United States, but to give Vietnam independent capital. As long as Vietnam became independent and did not tie itself to the chariot of the United States and the Soviet Union, the core goal of aiding Vietnam in resisting the United States was also achieved.
Later, the reason why there was a self-defense counterattack against Vietnam was also because Vietnam had a tendency to fall to the Soviet Union, and when the war was fought, the Soviet Union did not send troops to help, and the Vietnamese themselves were sober.
Later, Vietnam promoted "equidistant" diplomacy and played a balance among several major powers, which shows that a series of foreign policies toward Vietnam over the past half century, including aiding Vietnam and resisting the United States, have achieved the desired results.
Second, open up the diplomatic situation in New China.
In the 1960s, China was sharply opposed to the hegemony of both camps at the same time, and although this was the severe pain that must be endured on the road to independence, at that time, we were indeed isolated internationally.
In 1963, Chairman Mao put forward the new concept of "two middle zones" diplomacy, holding that economically backward Asian, African and Latin American countries have objective needs to strive for national independence, and China can build a banner for them by aiding Vietnam to resist the United States.
The purpose of this diplomatic proposition is to bring the vast number of Asian, African, and Latin American countries that aspire to true national independence into China's camp and jointly confront the hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union, thus forming a three-legged momentum in the international arena.
Obviously, Vietnam is a representative country in the middle zone, a country plagued by hegemony and a neighbor of China, and if it does not fully support it, China will lose the trust of third world countries, and the diplomatic situation will be even more difficult.
Third, it has once again demonstrated to the world China's firm anti-aggression stance.
Like the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, aiding Vietnam to resist the United States was a difficult and passive decision, and this decision was not as simple as sending troops and equipment, but also included a complete set of coordination measures.
For example, after the outbreak of the Vietnam War, China was prepared for the "worst-case scenario", sending engineering and air defense troops into Vietnam was only the first step, and if the war worsened, it would continue to increase.
For example, since 1964, China has changed the guiding ideology of "taking economic construction as the center", and has begun to invest a lot of resources in the construction of the "big third line" in the interior, back up a set of industrial systems in the hinterland, and practice internal skills to prevent the extreme situation of being sandwiched by the four breads of the two hegemonic countries.
It can be said that in 1964, when the situation in Vietnam showed signs of deterioration, China had prepared for the worst, allowing the United States and the Soviet Union to see the determination and will of New China to seek independence and self-reliance and oppose hegemony and bullying.
Among the many asian, African and Latin American powers that emerged after World War II, China's independence was the highest, and the bottleneck of development was not pinched, which had historical reasons.
Aiding Vietnam to resist the United States is indispensable!
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bibliography:
1. Zhang Xiuge, A Preliminary Study on the Reasons for China's Aid to Vietnam to Resist the United States, journal of Mudanjiang University, May 2019;
2. Guo Ming, "Forty Years of Evolution of Sino-Vietnamese Relations", Guangxi People's Publishing House, 1992;
3. Lin Yang, Oral History of China's Military Operations to Aid Vietnam and Resist the United States, in The Collection of Excellent Papers of Guangxi Normal University, 2013.