Li De, the "head of the Foreign Religion" of the Red Army
Song Haifeng
In the spring and warm blossoms, I once again came to the red capital with the reputation of the cradle of the republic - Jiangxi Ruijin.
A few years ago, I went to Ruijin several times for writing the red story of the Central Soviet District. There are many stories of revolutionary ancestors that have been written into my red literature. This revisit to Hongdu is to write about why the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign in the Central Soviet Region failed. Why is there a Long March? Why the Long March became the beginning of a new situation.
In those few days in Ruijin, I plunged headlong into the historical materials, sank into them, combed through the historical documents, combed through the veins, and the logic of history gradually became clear, to explore the failure of the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression" in the Central Soviet Region, the Red Army was forced to withdraw from the Central Soviet Region, and embarked on the deep-seated origin of the tragic Long March, Li De is an unavoidable figure.
Party history records that Li De not only personally experienced the whole process of the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign in the Central Soviet Region, but also was an important decision-maker and the main commander of the Long March in the early stage. Shi Zhongquan, former deputy director of the Party History Research Office of the CPC Central Committee, once commented that although Li De came to the Soviet zone with good wishes to help the Chinese revolution, he carried out the erroneous command of military dogmatism and almost destroyed the Chinese revolution.
I came to The Former Residence of Li De in Shazhouba Town, a suburb of Ruijin City, to touch the texture of history and feel the pulse of history.
Locals say that it was a large rice field in the past, because it stood alone in the middle of the rice field, and the Hongdu people called it a "independent house". "Independent house" is a typical Hakka house in Gannan with "four lines and three rooms". There are 3 main houses, the middle hall is used as a conference room, hung with various military maps, the east room is Li De's bedroom, and the west room is inhabited by translators Wu Xiuquan and Wang Zhitao.
On the walls of the "Independent House" hall is prominently written the curriculum vitae of Li De, whose original name was Otto Braun, pen name Waffle, a German communist from the Soviet Union. His title was: "Military Adviser of the Comintern to China".
Why did Li De come to China? Was he really a "military adviser sent by the Comintern"?
The origin of many things in history is strung together by great contingencies. As Engels said, history is bound to evolve through endless chances.
In the summer of 1931, Niu Lan, secretary of the Far East Bureau of the Communist International and spy of the Far East Bureau of the Soviet General Staff, was rescued in the British Concession in Shanghai. Niu Lan and his wife, the Soviet General Staff sent two members of the German Communist Party to Shanghai to undertake the task of sending money to save people. One of them was Otto Braun, who worked in the Soviet General Staff.
Looking back at the past years, because Gu Shunzhang and Xiang Zhongfa were arrested and defected one after another, the provisional central government could not stay in Shanghai and was ready to scatter to the Central Soviet Region. Before leaving, Bogu wanted Otto Braun to go with him, and together with Arthur Yurt, the head of the Far East Bureau of the Comintern in Shanghai, sent several telegrams to the Comintern asking for instructions.
Why did Bogu choose Otto Braun for Central Sioux? During the rectification period in Yan'an, Bogu made a profound reflection, in my opinion, Li De has the sign of the Frunze Military Academy of the Soviet Union, participated in the First World War, should be an expert who understands the military, and is also a student studying in the Soviet Union, who met in Moscow, which is the best candidate for military advisers and can assist himself in military work.
In his book Glory of Blood, Jin Yinan wrote that the Comintern made it clear in its official reply that Otto Braun was at the mercy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China as a military adviser without the power to direct. In short, as an adviser, Otto Braun "had no power to direct," only the right to advise; as an adviser, Otto Braun was not ordained by the Comintern, but only by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
In September 1933, a tall foreigner with blue eyes and blond hair appeared in the Red Capital Ruijin of the Central Soviet District. The first foreign guest to appear in Ruijin was Otto Braun.
A memory has been engraved in the mind of Wu Xiuquan, the former deputy commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army, and on the night after Otto Braun arrived in the Central Soviet Region, Bogu said at a meeting to welcome him: Comrades, warmly welcome Comrade Otto Braun, the military adviser of the Communist International to our Party Central Committee that we have been waiting for a long time. For the sake of secrecy and the safety of the consultant comrades, after the meeting, he was always called "Li De" Chinese... Comrade Li De was a brilliant Bolshevik military man...
Because Bogu was a pioneer, and because the vast number of party members and cadres did not know the truth and out of respect for international figures, Otto Braun, in the name of Li De, justifiably became the military adviser of the Communist International to the Communist Party of China, attended the meetings of the CPC Central Committee and the Central Revolutionary Military Commission, and participated in the study and formulation of the CPC's various policies and decisions on the Red Army, especially for war, campaigns, and tactics.
For many years, a question has puzzled many people: Bogu, who has always been obedient to the Orders of the Communist International, has this time set aside the instructions of the Communist International and awarded Li De the Sword of Shang Fang, making him the "Emperor Taishang" who directly commanded the Red Army.
In addition to not understanding the military and relying heavily on Li De, Bogu is more important because the two "Left" ideological bases are consistent, they lack a correct understanding of China's revolutionary practice, and copy the classic expositions of Marxism, thus providing a suitable climate and soil for the survival and development of Li De's "Left" military line.
A few years later, when Yan'an rectified the situation, Bogu admitted his mistake: "Li De overstepped his authority in the Central Soviet Region, and I indulged his ultra vires, which was a serious mistake and should be punished by the party." ”
Some historians have proposed three kinds of historical time - "long time", "medium period" and "short time period", which deal with the "structure", "situation" and "event" in history respectively. "Events" are "dust", and "structure" is the decisive factor in history.
The "independent house" witnessed that at the beginning of the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression", Li De "created" a "structure". This "structure" is to take books, theories, and the experiences or theories of foreign victories under specific conditions as dogmas, to proceed from definitions and formulas, and not to integrate the universal truth of Marxism with the concrete practice of China...
It is precisely for this reason that Li De comprehensively repudiated Mao Zedong's effective strategic principles and operational principles, and at the beginning he practiced military adventurism, practiced "hitting people with two fists," adopted the principle of "separating operations," and fought a hard-fought decisive battle with the enemy army; after losing defeat, he also promoted conservatism in defense...
The "independent house" witnessed that Mao Zedong had entered the "independent house" five times, and with profound strategic vision and incisive analysis, proposed to Li De the strategy of retreating from the enemy, and encountered just like the Xin abandonment disease of that year: "But he exchanged the ten thousand words for the owner's tree book." ”
Copying theories cannot write your own history, and copying other people's models cannot open up your own path. With the telegram with the distinctive mark of Li De sent to the red army corps, the scene of the Central Soviet District "winding the red flag over the big mark" was no longer there.
The Red First Army, which had been mobile and flexible in the past anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaigns and was able to recruit good battles, suffered heavy casualties due to falling into Li De's "short assault" tactics and losing nine out of ten battles;
Successive anti-"encirclement and suppression" fierce blows and fierce attacks on the Red Third Army, which can gnaw hard bones, suffered heavy casualties in the Battle of Huwan, heavy casualties in deshengguan, and heavy casualties in the battle of Zhumazhai;
The Red Fifth and Red Seventh Armies fought between the enemy fortress and the main force, completely caught in the predicament of passive beating.
……
Many years later, Marshal Peng Dehuai, then commander of the Red Third Army Corps, recalled in "Peng Dehuai's Self-Description" that in mid-April, the enemy concentrated 11 divisions to attack Guangchang in two ways in an attempt to open the gate of the base area from the north. Peng Dehuai repeatedly told Li De and Bogu that Guangchang could not be held firmly, otherwise the Red First and Third Armies would be completely annihilated.
However, under the slogans of "resisting the enemy outside the gates of the country," "never abandoning an inch of land in the Soviet zone," and "either victory or death," Li De ordered the nine divisions of the Red First, Red, Red, Fifth, and Red Ninth Armies to adopt the "playing style" of "using fortresses against fortresses and making short surprise attacks" to stick to Guangchang and fight a decisive battle against the enemy.
Guangchang is the northern gate of the Central Soviet District. The Battle of Guangchang, directly commanded by Li De, was the fiercest battle in the Fifth Anti-"Encirclement and Suppression" War, and it was fought very fiercely. On both sides of the FuHe River, 30,000 Red Army faced off against enemies several times their own, built forts and dug trenches, and fought hard under the fierce artillery fire of the enemy, and the Red Army suffered heavy casualties.
Many years later, Yang Shangkun, who was then the political commissar of the Red Third Army, still remembered this fiasco and was heartbroken, and a whole battalion of the Red Third Army was destroyed by enemy artillery because of the fortifications, and all of them were sacrificed. The defense of Guangchang lasted for 18 days, and although the enemy was severely damaged, its own casualties accounted for one-fifth of the total troops participating in the battle. After the Battle of Guangchang, Marshal Peng Dehuai, who was known for his honesty, rebuked Li De in person, "It is not painful for the cub to sell Ye Tian"!
Standing on the historical scale of the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression", I suddenly felt a pang of spiritual pain: Li De "worked on the map" in the "independent house" and practiced the tactic of "beggars and dragon kings comparing treasures", which almost caused disasters to the Communist Party of China, the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and the Chinese revolution.
Gazing intently at the schematic diagram of the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign of the Central Revolutionary Base Area on the wall, the memories of Wu Xiuquan, former deputy commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army, were transmitted in historical time and space, and the one-hundred-thousandth of a map used at that time was very erroneous, and Li De's map, even the location where a bunker should be dug, the location where a sentry should be erected, a mortar and even a machine gun were all clearly stipulated, and must be implemented to the letter. Once the battle was lost, Li De punished the Red Army commanders at every turn, and even wanted to cut them.
When Li Chuan was lost and the battle to recover Li Chuan was also defeated, Li De, who was self-conscious, did not feel that he should bear any responsibility, but instead imposed the charge of losing the battle on the head of Xiao Jinguang, commander of the Fujian Military Region, and resolutely advocated killing Xiao Jinguang... It was only mao Zedong's resolute opposition that Xiao Jinguang "saved" his life.
Those who are good at governing the army are good at plotting the situation; those who decide the winner or loser are good at layout. During the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign, Marshal Liu Bocheng repeatedly proposed to Li De that the current strategy must be changed as soon as possible, otherwise he would become a sinner for eternity. However, Li De not only did not accept it, but instead dismissed him from the post of chief of the general staff of the Red Army and demoted him to chief of staff of the Red 5 Army.
Wang Zhitao, who also served as Li De's translator, recalled that after the defeat in the Battle of Guangchang, the situation on the front line deteriorated, the eastern and northern fronts were broken, and the western front was more difficult. At the beginning of October, the xingguo, Ningdu, and Shicheng lines fell one after another, and the central base area was shrinking day by day. The possibility of the Red Army smashing the enemy's "encirclement and suppression" in the base areas has been completely lost.
The Red regime was in jeopardy.
Military strategy tells people that only by not being blinded by "Tarzan collapsing in front" and not being distracted by the chaos of "Mi Lu xing on the left" can the general gain a kind of enduring concentration. However, at this time, Bogu and Li De were intimidated by the enemy's fierce momentum and panicked and decided to abandon the Central Soviet Region and implement a strategic shift.
Where will the Red Army going west go? Marshal Nie Rongzhen, who was the political commissar of the Red First Army at the time, clearly remembered that at the beginning of the Long March, Bogu and Li De only wanted to move their "home" to xiangxi and join the Red Second and Sixth Armies, so the initial action of the Red Army was called the "Western Expedition" and took away the "altar jars" in the Soviet area.
Harrison Salisbury said the Long March "is not a march in the general sense, not a battle, not a victory ... It's a battle of peril and danger."
Looking at the long river of history, in the first three months of the Long March, in the enemy's encirclement and blockade, the Central Red Army was sharply reduced from 86,000 to 30,000 people, with more than half of the losses and on the verge of collapse.
"People who have never cried are not enough to speak of life." In the 1920s and 1930s, Mr. Lu Xun used this sentence to express his deep and painful thinking on the future and destiny of the country and the nation.
"Heaven wants to fall, and it depends on the period of hanging." The soldiers of the Red Army knew Mao Zedong at the time of victory and remembered Mao Zedong even more when they lost. The blood of the XiangJiang River brought unprecedented shock to the survivors, and everyone began to think: Will the battle continue like this? Will the Red Army continue like this?
History will remember every churning wave, every bloody river, how they once rushed forward in their cries.
Following the vein of time, I clearly perceived in the tunnel of time and space that under the emergency situation in which the Kuomintang army was waiting with a net and "inviting the king to enter the urn," Mao Zedong stepped forward with a high sense of responsibility as a communist, tried his best to stop the blind command of Bogu and Li De, and advocated that we should resolutely advance toward Guizhou, where the enemy's forces are relatively weak, in order to save the crisis and win the initiative.
Marx once humorously said, "To learn to walk, one must also learn to wrestle, and only by wrestling can one learn to walk." ”
Upholding the truth and correcting mistakes is the distinctive character of our party. After the fierce struggle between the three meetings of Daodao, Liping, and Monkey Farm, the majority of the politburo of the CPC Central Committee denied the erroneous proposition that Bogu and Li De insisted on going north to Xiangxi to join the Red Second and Red Sixth Armies, affirmed Mao Zedong's correct proposition on changing the direction of the Red Army's advance, and laid an ideological and organizational foundation for the successful convening of the Zunyi Conference.
Ye Xie of the Qing Dynasty wrote in the "Original Poem": "Out of love, for the scenery, for things, people have not tasted what they say and started to say it, so those who speak and those who hear their words are sincerely pleasing and sing." ”
The pioneering, original, and pioneering nature of "self-initiation" is an important symbol of our party's final progress from its infancy to its maturity.
From the founding of the party to the founding of the people' republic of China, the Communist Party of China has gone for 28 years, and the midpoint of the time and space coordinates fell on Zunyi in 1935. At the Zunyi Conference, the "Left" military line was criticized, Bogu and Li De were stripped of the supreme military command, and Mao Zedong entered the leadership core of the Party Central Committee. The young Chinese Communist Party threw away its "foreign crutches."
The Zunyi Conference was the first time that the Communist Party of China independently and autonomously applied the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism, corrected the mistakes of the Communist International in guiding the Chinese revolution, resolved the beginning of the question of the line, principles and policies of the Chinese revolution, and straightened out the course of the Chinese revolution at an extremely critical juncture.
Independence and autonomy make the road to victory. After the Zunyi Conference, the Central Red Army stepped on an iron footboard, suddenly crossed the Chishui River in four directions, crossed the Jinsha River by chance, forcibly crossed the Dadu River, flew over the Luding Bridge, climbed the snowy mountains and crossed the meadows, cut through the passes all the way, completely smashed the encirclement and blockade of hundreds of thousands of Kuomintang troops, and reached northern Shaanxi in victory.
According to the book "A Lifetime Of Following Mao Zedong: Remembering My Father," Chen Shiyu, the founding general of the people's republic of China, after practical education, Li De admitted his mistake, and when summarizing the fifth anti-"encirclement and suppression" campaign he commanded, he said frankly: "I finally understood that the Chinese comrades knew better than I did the correct strategy and tactics of their revolutionary war in their own country, and I did not command according to China's geographical situation and Chinese unique combat traditions." In the struggle against Zhang Guotao's separatism and other struggles, Li De resolutely sided with the correct line represented by Mao Zedong.
At dusk, I came to Yunshi Mountain, which is known as the "first mountain of the Long March", and stopped in the former residence of Mao Zedong, and the incisive words of a generation of great people whispered in my ear: "There are advantages and disadvantages to sir; don't sir, read by yourself, write by yourself, think about problems by yourself, this is also a truth." After the Zunyi Conference, the Communist Party of China began to "read and write without a husband, and to take the road of leading the Chinese revolution independently and autonomously." In the 14 years that followed, the Chinese revolution marched forward to victory with its head held high.
Under the brilliant sunset, facing the winding mountains of the red capital, my thoughts stirred in history and reality, and taking my own road was the historical conclusion reached by the party's hundred years of struggle. Marxist dialectics requires specific analysis of specific situations. Our party conditions and national conditions are different from those of other countries, and if we regard others as "teachers" or simply apply the experience and practices of others, it will be impossible for the Communist Party of China today to stand on its own feet and strengthen itself, nor will it be possible to have the brilliant achievements of the century-old party.
At this moment, I sincerely sigh that yes, on the journey of realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, only by unswervingly following our own path, the great cause we have created and committed to advancing will surely coexist with heaven and earth and shine with the sun and the moon.
Time is a faithful witness and a great writer.
(The author is a senior reporter of Jiangxi Daily)