The History of banditry in the War of Liberation - A Brief Record of banditry in Yishan, Guangxi

Prologue: Ambushed by bandits, the PLA lost a company.

The weather in May is the end of spring and the beginning of summer, neither the cold of the spring, nor the impetuousness and laziness of the midsummer.

On May 24, 1950, more than 60 people from the 7th Company of the 346th Regiment of the 346th Regiment of the 115th Division of the 39th Army marched on the road from the county seat of Yishan (present-day Yizhou District, Guangxi) to Beiya Township. They went to Yishan County to collect military uniforms and returned to Beiya Street.

A large expanse of black and wanton manyan sky, in a few moments it is like a closed world, reaching out and not seeing five fingers, and the black is suffocating.

It was dark when the troops marched to the village of Chengqiao in Xiaoshan Township, so Fan Xiangyun, deputy platoon commander, led the soldiers to spend the night in a ruined temple on the edge of the village, and at dawn the next day, the troops paid off the things they had borrowed from the masses, compensated the poor peasants Zhang Zhenru and Ou Yukuan for the damage to the tile bowls, and continued to rush back to Beiya Street.

On the night that the People's Liberation Army was stationed in Tangtou Village, Zhou Lin, deputy director of the bandits' "Guangxi Tenth District Anti-Communist National Salvation Army" wing, and Zhou Zuochen, a backbone cadre of the bandits, sneaked to Luoyan and Miaobei in the low mountains overnight to report to the bandits.

Led by bandit leaders Wei Zuoping, Lu Fucai, and Li Shude, more than 600 bandits from three groups, including the "East China Advance Brigade" and the "Anti-Communist National Salvation Army in the Qiangui Border Region," rushed to the Second Pass to lay an ambush.

Er pass, is the yishan county to the north of the road must pass, the mountain road is rugged, the terrain is dangerous, the pass on all sides of the lone peaks, the mountain is luxuriant, green bamboo shade.

There were a few remnants of stars hanging in the gray sky, and the earth was shrouded in a gray-black light veil. There was silence, and occasional insects chirped from the grass. On the evening of the 24th, the bandits ambushed in the sheep intestine trails on both sides of the pass road with thorns and weeds and trees, preparing to sneak into the People's Liberation Army transport team the next day.

The sky was gradually breaking, and the earth was hazy, like a light veil shrouded in silver gray. At about 8:00 a.m. on the morning of the 25th, more than 60 soldiers in uniform of the seventh company of the third battalion marched to the second pass in the morning sun. At this time, the bandits, taking advantage of the condescending terrain, strafed the People's Liberation Army with four machine guns, blocked both ends of the mountain pass path, and surrounded the soldiers of our army in the rushing section of the road.

The warriors heard the gunshots and realized that they had been ambushed by bandits, and the warriors immediately dropped their burdens and scattered in formation to return fire. Some PLA fighters braved the enemy's gunfire and bullets to rush out of the enemy's encirclement and ran back to Beiya and Xiaoshan to report on the situation. Some of the fighters stayed behind to resist stubbornly. The only warriors left to resist the bandits were about twenty rifles, while the bandits had four machine guns and more than eight hundred long and short guns. With the enemy outnumbered, the warriors fought bravely against more than a thousand bandits.

Under the leadership of Comrade Fan Xiangyun, deputy platoon leader, the bandits repelled one attack after another, forcing the bandits to shrink on the mountain and dare not come down. The battle went on from nine o'clock in the morning to three o'clock in the afternoon. However, under the siege of a large number of bandits, the warriors ran out of ammunition and fought the enemy with stones as weapons. Finally, the stones were used up, and the warriors shouted slogans and bravely engaged the bandits in hand-to-hand combat. After more than ten minutes of short engagement, the People's Liberation Army sacrificed thirty-six soldiers, and the remaining twenty-nine soldiers unfortunately fell into the hands of the enemy.

The bandits used all kinds of inhumane fascist means against the fighters I had been captured, and these bandits stripped the fighters of their clothes, tortured them severely, and connected the hearts of the captured fighters with iron wires. In order to lure the captured soldiers to defect to them, the bandit leader Lu Fucai brought boiling water and hot meals to "impress" the captured soldiers. In the face of the bandits' false "benevolence", the captured warriors looked up and shouted at the bandits: "If you want to kill, kill, cut!" In any case, when it fell into your hands, I didn't want to live again." Faced with the indomitable PLA fighters, the bandits decided to poison them that night.

The ferocious bandits took 29 fighters to Fuwei Cave for killing. The bandits first cut the 4 warriors into the liver and then threw them into the black hole. Two of the warriors could not bear the cruelty of the enemy, and when the enemy was not prepared, they jumped into the Fuwei Cave more than a dozen meters deep, and the rest of the fighters were stabbed to death by the bandits with bayonets and pushed down the hole, and then the cruel bandits picked up more than ten loads of firewood and threw them into the cave and set fire to the corpses.

In addition, according to statistics, during the Yishan bandit rebellion from January 1950 to June 1951, 735 people were killed by bandits, including 23 district and township cadres, 7 members of the county task force, 64 members of the People's Liberation Army, 17 cadres of the peasant association, 17 members of the militia, and 614 people in townships and towns. 732 guns of various kinds were robbed, 2,333 cattle, 1,627 pigs, 277,400 kilograms of grain, 571 houses were burned, 2 bridges were blown up, other materials were lost worth 70,000 yuan, and more than 2,000 households were victimized.

In the face of such rampant bandit raids, in order to consolidate the nascent revolutionary regime, in late July 1950, the Yishan County Party Committee decided to set up a command center for suppressing bandits, with Han Yinting, commander of the 522nd Regiment of the 174th Division of the 58th Army, as the commander, and Tian Ye, the political commissar, and Wu Shiguang, the county magistrate, as the deputy commander, and five command posts under it. Li Tingxiang, secretary of the Working Committee of the First Command Post, and Wu Shiguangjian, commander of the First Command Post, were stationed in Sancha, Luodong, Pingnan, Outong, Limiao, and other townships; Kong Xiantong, secretary of the Working Committee of the Second Command Post, and Guo Tinglan, commander of the Command Post, were stationed in Yiping, Luoyan, and Da'an; Wu Zhen, secretary of the Working Committee of the Third Command Post, and Qiao Luhong, commander of the Command, were stationed in Shibie, Yongding, Beishan, and other places; Ma Guohu, secretary of the Working Committee of the Fourth Command Post, and Zeng Desheng, commander of the Command Post, were stationed in Desheng, Longtou, and other places; Li Yunsheng, secretary of the Working Committee of the Fifth Command Post, and Zhang Shuzeng, commander of the Command Post, were stationed in Beiya, Lali, Huaiyuan, and other places. Anma and other places.

The county brigade, district squadron, and county task force cooperated with the battalions of the 522nd Regiment to enter the township and station it. In August, the 3rd Battalion of the 522nd Regiment, with the cooperation of the Fourth District Task Force and the Yishan Military Sub-district Reorganization Committee, encircled and suppressed the bandits entrenched in Pingnan, Yishan. Soon, the bandits were eliminated and 800 people were registered as new. In the same month, the first battalion of the 15th Regiment (transferred from Hebei to Yishan to suppress bandits and incorporated into the 522nd Regiment) set out from Jinchengjiang and Beiya Township to attack the bandits in Longtou Township, and the special service battalion of the Eighth Column of the Whole Annihilation Bandits killed 3 people under Lan Si, the commander of the bandit battalion, wounded 2 people, and captured 65 people below wang Zuo, the township chief of the bandit township.

In September 1950, the People's Liberation Army suppressed the bandits in the besieged village and Beishan Township. In early October, the Shibetsu District Government moved from the Dragon Arch Guerrilla Zone back to the Shibetsu Street garrison to mobilize the masses to suppress bandits and carry out various tasks. In late October, Wei Zuoping's bandits were chased again in Beishan Township and fled in the direction of Da'an and Lalang, where they approached Zhu Zhida and the blue-robed bandits. On October 27, after the county people's government issued the "Notice on Bandit Self-Renewal Measures," 2,812 bandits in the eight key bandit townships of Beiya, Limiao, Luoxi, Pingnan, Ouzhi, Shibei, Yongding, and Beishan registered with the government.

On November 8, the 522nd Regiment of the People's Liberation Army and the Independent Battalion of the Yishan Military Sub-district attacked and suppressed the Bandits of Shibei, annihilating more than 300 people and capturing Li Xiunan, the leader of the Bandits' Squadron. On November 12, Zhu Zhida and Wei Zuoping's bandits were defeated in Niugao Village and fled to Hechi County and Donglan County. In January 1951, the People's Liberation Army dispatched the 64O Regiment and the 641st Regiment of the 214th Division to the county to suppress bandits.

On January 23, they attacked the bandits who were entrenched in Weidao Village and Ji Hat Tun; on March 31, Zhu Zhida and Wei Zuoping's bandits returned and were defeated during the attack on Longtou Township, and the remnants fled to Buchuanling in Luoxi Township and were completely annihilated. Wei Zuoping was captured alive, and at this point, except for a few bandits and bandits who were on the run, all the bandits in the county were eliminated. In the pursuit and suppression and blockade battle, 67,000 people from Longtou, Lali, Beiya, Tongde, Xiaoshan, Luodong, Luoxi and other townships, 4,972 teenagers, 1,013 members of the basic cadre militia, 1,423 members of the land reform task force and the peasant association task force, and 2,274 public security and local armed personnel took part in the encirclement and suppression and mountain search operations. By the end of June, a total of 16,703 bandits had been eliminated, including 11 bandits at the column level, 79 at the detachment level, 342 at the brigade level, 645 at the squadron level, 2,240 at the detachment level, and 13,386 bandits. Three 60 guns, 14 heavy machine guns, 42 light machine guns, 11,000 long and short guns, and 159,400 rounds of various bullets were captured. Since then, bandits in the county have basically disappeared.

——Author: Li Ning