In November 1948, the two major field armies of Huaye and Zhongye jointly launched a large-scale offensive against the Kuomintang army in Xuzhou, known as the Huaihai Campaign. In order to strengthen the defense force in the Xuzhou area, the Kuomintang urgently transferred the 12th Corps of Huang Wei, which was originally stationed in the western Henan area, to move westward. In the process of advancing in the direction of Xuzhou, the 12th Corps of Huang Wei, which was advancing alone, was surrounded by our army in the southwest of Suxian County, Anhui Province and the surrounding areas of Shuangduiji.
When the news of the siege of the 12th Corps came, the deputy commander of the 12th Corps, who was "recuperating" at home in Wuhan, could no longer sit still, and took the initiative to go to Nanjing to meet Chiang Kai-shek, expressing his willingness to immediately rush to the Huaihai front to save the crisis. Hu Lian understood that the 12th Corps and the 18th Army, the main ace force, were where he had his life, and once the 12th Corps was destroyed, he, the deputy commander of the Corps, would become helpless. Seeing that he was so bold, Chiang Kai-shek immediately agreed to let him enter the front line quickly. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek asked Huang Wei to build an airstrip in Shuangduiji, so that Air Force Commander Zhou Zhirou could send a plane to send Hu Lian directly to the Shuangduiji area.
In Chen Cheng's civil engineering department and even in the entire Kuomintang army, Hu Lian can be called a fierce general, he has fought many vicious battles and tough battles in his life, especially in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. During the Battle of Wuhan, he organized an "artillery guerrilla unit" to successfully cover the navy's task of laying mines on the Yangtze River, sinking more than 200 Japanese warships; in the Battle of Yichang, he led the 11th Division of the 18th Army to fight 60,000 Japanese invaders for a week, repelling the enemy's attacks on land, sea, and air, and winning a major victory in what is known as the "Battle of Stalingrad in China." In the early days of the Liberation War, Hu Lian fought against the East China Field Army many times, although each had its own victory and defeat, but each time he was able to retreat, even Chairman Mao praised him as "cunning as a fox and as fierce as a tiger", which shows that this person has a high military level. So, what impact will Huang Wei's 12th Corps have on the battle situation if it is surrounded and gathered, and Hu Lian will take a special plane to the battle line in person?
From God's point of view, Hu Lian's parachuting into the double pile after the 12th Corps was surrounded must have had no effect, otherwise why would Huang Wei's 12th Corps still be completely wiped out in the end! The result is true, but Hu Lian's presence on the front line still brought some variables to the whole process. After all, Hu Lian has served as the commander of the Eighteenth Army for a long time, and is known as the soul of the Twelfth Corps.
First of all, long before Hu Lian's arrival, in the process of eating the "hard walnut" of the 12th Corps, Nakano had already encountered the problem of lack of experience in positional warfare and absolute weakness in firepower, but Chief Liu Deng and Chairman Mao thought of switching to the combat method of building a large number of communication trenches and implementing close operations, constantly compressing its living space, and then encroaching on the Huang Wei Corps step by step. After Hu Lian arrived, he built a veritable "steel defense line" by arranging the large American trucks that had lost their mobile role in a circle, which slowed down the progress of our army's attack to a certain extent.
Secondly, before Hu Lian came to Shuangduiji, the morale of the Kuomintang officers and soldiers of the 12th Corps was declining day by day. After the arrogant Hu Lian arrived, his former old subordinates became excited one by one, as if they saw that the old army commander could bring them a way to live, and their morale was greatly improved. Hu Lian asked Zhou Zhirou's air force to increase air support for the 12th Corps, changed the previous decadence, and constantly counterattacked our army. During the day, Hu Lian used all kinds of new weapons to seize the lost position, and at night our army, which was good at night fighting, recaptured the position.
Thirdly, before Hu Lian arrived, although Huang Wei was the commander of the 12th Corps, his vigilance was not strong enough, and he believed that Liao Yunzhou led the 110th Division of the 85th Army to take the lead in breaking through, and also gave him many tanks, howitzers and other heavy weapons. When Xiong Shouchun, the commander of the 14th Army, received a letter from Chen Geng, an old classmate of the Whampoa Military Academy, and also had the idea of an uprising, Hu Lian was keenly aware of his intentions and successfully interfered with his uprising plan, and eventually led to Xiong Shouchun being killed by a cannon in the breakout.
In the end, although the 12th Corps did not escape the fate of annihilation in the final breakthrough, Huang Wei, the commander of the 12th Corps, and Yang Botao, the acting commander of the 18th Army, were directly captured, but Hu Lian still escaped from the Shuangduiji front line by luck. Although the escape process was quite dangerous and Hu Lian himself was seriously injured, Hu Lian finally brought out more than 2,000 remnants of the 12th Corps and retreated to the Jiangnan area. Although these more than 2,000 people are insignificant, they are the foundation for Hu Lian's later reconstruction of the 12th Corps, which dealt a fatal blow to our army in the Battle of Kinmen in 1949, so that the period for liberating the island has been extended to this day. To sum up, Hu Lian, a fierce general of the Chinese army in the Huaihai Campaign, went to the front line in person, although it failed to change the final outcome of the Huaihai Campaign, but it also brought many variables to the entire battle situation.
Resources:
[1] "Huaihai Campaign" Yuan Tingdong