One
On February 20, 1950, when the People's Liberation Army captured Kunming, Li Guohui, commander of the 237th Division of the Kuomintang 8th Army, led more than 1,000 remnants of the army to retreat and fled to western Burma.
Li Guohui led his troops to tremble through the mountains for two days, entering a primeval forest covering the sky from the Wa Mountain in the Western Union, and after several twists and turns, they finally reached a place called Xiaomengbao on the border of Myanmar.
Li Guohui felt that Xiaomengbao was a village of more than 2,000 people, with food, and the PLA would not chase here. So, he ordered the transmitter to send a telegram to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, and after waiting for most of the day, he received a reply call: "Li Guohui, your department has found its own way out." ”
Li Guohui's heart was half cold, he followed Chiang Kai-shek to birth and death, but now he was abandoned, and he handed the telegram to Tan Zhong, the deputy of the regiment.
The two discussed and decided to station the troops in Xiaomengbao. Then they began to recruit troops, sheltering rangers and scattering bravery, and soon recruited another 3,500 people.
So many people needed to eat and dress, so Li Guohui ordered officers and soldiers to clear the land to solve the problem of food, work as bodyguards for drug dealers, and collect protection money to solve the problem of military salaries.
While Li Guohui was busy solving the problem of survival, this morning, suddenly the adjutant came to report: "The 15,000 members of the Burmese Defense Forces have cut off the retreat of the Nationalist army to Thailand and surrounded them." ”
Li Guohui was shocked when he heard this. At this time, the commander of the Burmese army, Kandanxin, sent a letter. The letter restricts all the remnants of the Kuomintang to lay down their arms and surrender within 10 days, otherwise they will be annihilated on the spot.
Li Guohui read the letter, and he analyzed that the Burmese army was afraid of death in a war, as long as they first annihilated one of their battalions, they would have bargaining chips, and then retreated into the primeval forest to fight guerrilla. As a result, Li Guohui refused to surrender.
Early that morning, 10 days later, six Burmese bombers entered the sky over Xiaomeng and dropped bombs. Suddenly, the bomb sounded, and the flames burst into the sky. The Burmese army's eight heavy guns and ten machine guns began to frantically shell and strafe the remnants.
The 278th Regiment of the remnant army suffered more than 50 casualties, and several battalion commanders hurriedly complained to Li Guohui. Li Guohui immediately decided to abandon his position and retreat to the primeval forest of Mengguo.
However, it was too late, and the Myanmar Defense Forces had sent more than 10,000 people to guard the crossings of the mountains to prevent the remnants from fleeing into the primeval forest.
Li Guohui had to direct his troops to fight and retreat, and by dusk in the afternoon, he still could not enter the primeval forest. On the other hand, Tan Zhong's department had safely retreated to the primeval forest.
It soon got dark, and Li Guohui had an idea. He ordered the officers and men of the regiment to mount bayonets, and he rushed to the front with large knives.
Although the Burmese army was closely guarded at various junctions, they squatted on the ground one by one to rest when it was dark.
Li Guohui, armed with a large knife, rushed forward with an arrow and cut off the head of a Burmese soldier.
The commander-in-chief took the lead, and the remnants of the soldiers forged forward bravely, brandishing their big knives to open a bloody road, and all entered the primeval forest at 12 o'clock at night.
At this time, more than 20,000 people from the Myanmar Defense Forces chased them in an attempt to drive the remnants out of the forest and wipe them out.
Li Guohui knows that the enemy is strong and we are weak, and we cannot fight hard. So he ordered his troops to deal with the Burmese army in the primeval forest, and then launched a counterattack after dragging them down.
After 12 days of fighting with the Burmese army, the Burmese army was exhausted. Seeing that the time had come, Li Guohui decided to immediately launch a counterattack against the Burmese army.
Li Guohui ordered deputy regiment commander Dong Xiangheng to lead 400 elite troops to attack the Burmese Army headquarters in Mengguo at night, leaving his group leaderless.
Therefore, Dong Xiangheng led 400 native soldiers to attack 140 li overnight, and quietly reached the mouth of Mengguo Town before dawn, they first killed 2 sentries, and then quickly rushed into the headquarters of the Burmese army. After a fierce battle, Meng Guo was recaptured.
At the same time, Li Guohui personally led 50 warriors, and at midnight that day, they entered the artillery positions of the Burmese army from the back mountain, killed more than ten Burmese soldiers with bayonets, captured 205 people, captured ten cannons, and won a complete victory.
After dawn, Li Guohui ordered ten artillery guns to fire at the Burmese position, and the Burmese army never dreamed that the remnants of the army still had artillery, and they were immediately defeated and retreated, and after a day of fierce fighting, the remnants won a big victory.
Two
Li Guohui returned to the regiment headquarters and was elated, but at this moment the deputy regiment commander Dong Xiangheng returned dejectedly.
He told Mr. Lee that after they occupied the Burmese headquarters, his battalion commander, Zhang Rui, and more than 100 soldiers had disappeared.
"Could it be that he died in battle?" Li Guohui asked.
"Tuanzai, this is impossible, because the more than 400 people I brought with me were divided into three teams to attack, and when we entered the headquarters, we didn't see Zhang Rui and their team, could it be that they were captured by the Burmese army?"
Just when Li Guohui and Dong Xiangheng guessed that this small force was missing.
Zhang Rui had already led his small army of more than 100 people into the primeval forests of several mountains in Burma.
Zhang Rui, a native of Kunming, joined the Kuomintang troops in 1937 and followed Li Guohui's army to resist the Japanese. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Zhang Rui, who wholeheartedly hoped for the reunification and peace of the country, missed his parents in his hometown and wanted to be disbanded and returned to the field. But at this time, Chiang Kai-shek launched a civil war, Zhang Rui was tired of war, but there was no way.
So, with the crushing defeat of the Kuomintang, after his unit was defeated by the People's Liberation Army in Yunnan, he followed Li Guohui to the Sino-Burmese border.
At that time, Zhang Duan, who was already the commander of the first battalion, did not want to do this for the rest of his life, and he always tried to find a way to escape the remnants of the army and join the People's Liberation Army. Several times he wanted to pull up the team and leave the remnants of the army, but the deputy regiment commander Dong Xiangheng was by his side, and he had no way to lead his troops to escape for a while.
At this time, 20,000 people from the Myanmar Defense Forces surrounded their troops.
On this day, Deputy Regiment Commander Dong Xiangheng returned from a meeting, and he brought Zhang Rui and another battalion commander and told them to lead a 400-man operation to raid the Burmese military headquarters.
The remnants of the army were divided into three squads, with him and a battalion commander plus Dong Xiangheng, one each commanded, and raided the Burmese headquarters in three ways.
When Zhang Duan heard this, he was secretly happy in his heart, "There is no place to step on iron shoes, and it takes no effort to get it." "This is the best time to escape.
Therefore, he secretly called two henchmen and company commanders, told them to feign an attack, and then took advantage of the chaos to enter a number of mountains to the west, and then detoured from the mountains into Yunnan to surrender to the PLA.
After the plan was formulated, on this night, when Dong Xiangheng gave the order to attack, Zhang Duan left the battlefield with his team and took the opportunity to flee into the Savage Mountain.
Three
After Zhang Duan and his party entered the mountain, they did not dare to act for fear of being discovered by the Burmese military aircraft. Waiting until dark, Zhang Duan followed the direction of the compass, led the team, and walked forward one foot deep and one foot shallow.
However, due to dark, Zhang Duan and they got lost in the mountains between the border between China and Myanmar.
At dawn, they rested for half a day and walked for another day. But I found myself always walking through the forests of the barren mountains, and I couldn't find a way out.
At this time, each soldier carried less and less dry food on him. And Zhang Rui found that in the process of blindly looking for the way, the troops were sinking deeper and deeper into the mountains, surrounded by dense artemisia grass except for the woods.
Every soldier was extremely depressed, they complained that they should not flee, and they knew that this was better to stay in the army.
With the treacherous environment, the soldiers' accusations became increasingly high, and the troops had even begun to split into several factions, and the two company commanders were ready to flee in the direction they had identified.
At this time, Zhang Duan knew in his heart that infighting and mutiny were about to break out, but he couldn't think of any good way to appease them, and after thinking about it, he was still helpless.
On this day, when Zhang Duan and they were walking west, they suddenly found a house at the foot of the mountain, and the soldiers were very excited when they saw it.
They ran down the hill quickly, but when the soldiers entered the house, they were greatly disappointed. It turned out to be an abandoned and uninhabited house that had long been abandoned. The room was covered with thick dust. Apart from some shabby furniture, there was no food at all.
Suddenly, a soldier shouted with joy. It turned out that in the broken cabinet he found a yellowed hand-drawn map with mountains depicted and their names marked in Burmese.
Zhang Duan and the two company commanders eagerly spread out the map, and saw that it was marked with the names of the mountains and the Burmese characters.
It is a pity that no one in the team knows Burmese. Zhang Duan and several officers were disappointed.
They looked at the map, trying to find out the secret, and in the end, everyone agreed that it was a topographic map of the area.
As soon as the news came out, all the soldiers saw the hope of escape, and all kinds of disputes immediately subsided, and the morale of the officers and soldiers was boosted.
Zhang Rui and two company commanders studied this map for half a day, and he took this map and decided to lead his troops out of this valley of death.
However, what troubled him was that the map was too simple and the scale was very imprecise, and sometimes after walking in the direction indicated by the map for a whole day, he would find that there were cliffs in front of him, and there was no way out.
Although so, after all, there is this map, and there is hope for its life; There is motivation to live. So, while looking at the map, they guessed the map, and so they walked for another 3 days.
At dawn, Zhang Rui woke up, he took a telescope to the high part of the hillside to look out, and found that at the end of the forest was a large plain, and several villages were faintly visible in the distance.
Zhang Rui jumped up with joy, and he couldn't wait to shout to his brothers: "Out of the mountain, we succeeded!" ”
When the extremely tired soldiers heard this, they were all sleepless, and everyone was in high spirits, crossed the meadow, and in only four or five hours walked out of the forest from the Jiangao Mountain, came to the plain, and entered the town of Wanmachi in Ruili County, Yunnan.
After Zhang Rui returned to China, they were warmly welcomed by the local people's government and properly resettled.
A year later, on this day, Zhang Rui, who returned to Kunming, invited a few friends and brothers who had lived and died with him, and during the dinner, he told his friends the story of life and death in the mountains of Burma, and showed a friend the map that saved their lives that he had always treasured with him.
The friend took the map and looked at it seriously, and Zhang Rui remembered that his friend was a university teacher and knew Burmese.
The friend carefully looked at the map, shook his head, and smiled meaningfully at him.
Then, pointing to the lines of Burmese characters on the top of the map, he told Zhang Rui: "This is a map of the Rakhine Mountains of Myanmar, if you had followed the correct direction indicated on this map, you would have gone to the middle of the country of Burma." ”
After Zhang Rui listened, he was stunned, and then he suddenly realized, according to the wrong way on the map, he didn't expect to make a mistake, and just returned to China, this is really providential! The two looked at each other, and everyone present couldn't help but laugh.