The Battle of Pingjin was one of the three major battles of the War of Liberation. In this campaign, the People's Liberation Army invested more than 1 million regular troops and mobilized two major combat clusters: the field troops of the North China Military Region and the main force of the Northeast Field Army after entering the customs. In order to unify and coordinate the two armies and ensure operational efficiency, the "General Front Committee" of the Pingjin Campaign was established under the instructions of the Central Military Commission. The command structure includes the main responsible persons of the People's Liberation Army in North China and Northeast China, and General Lin, Luo Shuai, and Nie Shuai are all key leaders.
However, it is a bit strange that Nie Rongzhen, as the commander of North China, ranks third in the General Front Committee, lower than President Lin and Luo Ronghuan. The party, government, and military central leading bodies have always paid attention to the order of ranking, and they have been very rigorous. Why did the two armies work closely together, but Nie Shuai "relegated" to the third place in the General Front Committee? It was just lower than General Lin, after all, the main force during the Pingjin Campaign was the Northeast Field Army, but the ranking of Luo Political Commissar was also above Nie Shuai, which was quite unexpected.
When examined in detail, it has a lot to do with the status of Luo and Nie in the party. In the army, during the War of Liberation, although Luo Ronghuan did not serve as the "number one" in the theater of operations like Nie Rongzhen, the party's command of the gun was the basic principle, and at the Seventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1945, Luo Ronghuan's ranking as a member of the Central Committee was higher than that of Nie Rongzhen, and this influence was very great. In fact, there were 44 members of the Central Committee elected by the Seventh National Congress, and all the ten marshals of the Republic were listed: Mr. Lin was ranked higher than Luo Ronghuan at that time, and Luo Ronghuan was higher than Nie Rongzhen.
Even in September 1955, when the whole army conferred the title, the ranking of the top ten marshals was completely consistent with the order of the seven members of the Central Committee mentioned above, which shows the importance of positions and positions in the party, and the same is true in the army. To take the most intuitive example, the Huaihai Campaign, which was launched almost simultaneously with the Pingjin Campaign, was also fought by two major field armies. The five main leaders of Huaye and Nakano formed the "General Front Committee" of the Huaihai Campaign, and the situation was very similar to that of the Pingjin Campaign. The secretary of the General Front Committee of the Huaihai Campaign was neither Liu Bocheng, commander of Zhongye, nor Chen Yi, commander of Huaye, but Comrade Xiaoping, who was the "first secretary of the Central Plains Bureau" of the CPC at that time. The reason is relatively clear, Deng Gong's party position at that time was higher than that of the two marshals.
Of course, fighting a war should not be rigid and dogmatic, and it should all depend on the situation of specific leaders and should also be combined with the actual conditions of the troops. Judging from the comparison of the strength of the North China and East China People's Liberation Army in the later stage of the Liberation War, it is also reasonable for the two leaders of the Northeast Field Army to lead the General Front Committee. Shortly before the Battle of Pingjin, Dongye had just eliminated the main force of the 470,000 Northeast Kuomintang Army and liberated the black soil. The position of the Northeast Field Army in the War of Liberation was the most prominent among the fraternal units, and was pinned on by the Central Military Commission and Chairman Mao.
Judging from the situation of the Pingjin Campaign, in 1948, our army in the northeast had 12 columns entering the customs, with about 700,000 regular troops, and the total number of soldiers and civilians in the accompanying branch exceeded 800,000; while Nie Rongzhen's North China troops had only more than 300,000 field troops, of which more than 100,000 were under Xu Xiangqian, who had always fought against Yan Xishan's troops in Shanxi and did not directly enter the Pingjin front. Therefore, it is clear at a glance that although our army in North China is the "host", it is Lin Luo's Northeast Field Army that plays the leading role in the Pingjin Campaign.
This characteristic was also confirmed in the course of the subsequent campaign: Only the main force of the Zhangjiakou and Xinbao operations on the western front was the North China People's Liberation Army, while the main responsibility for Tianjin on the eastern front and the core Beiping was the Northeast Field Army. Of course, an older generation revolutionary like Nie Rongzhen, who is all-powerful in military and political affairs, personally does not care about the so-called ranking order. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the marshal was awarded, Lin Shuai ranked third, Luo Shuai ranked seventh, and Nie Shuai ranked ninth.