In the autumn of 1949, Liu Shaoqi secretly went to Moscow for a visit. During his talks with the leaders of the CPSU and when he talked about the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of Kuomintang officers and soldiers captured by the PLA in the Liaoshen, Pingjin, and Huaihai campaigns, Stalin was incredulous.
Why?
In his opinion, it is impossible for the armies of other countries in the world, except for the Soviet Red Army, to capture hundreds of thousands of enemies in one campaign. The reason why he did not believe it was that on the one hand, it was his great-power chauvinism that made a mistake; on the other hand, the war of liberation went so smoothly and achieved such great results that even he and the senior cadres of the CPSU did not expect it.
Then, how many Kuomintang officers and soldiers were captured by the PLA during the entire Liberation War?
On 30 July 1948, the Xinhua News Agency published an editorial entitled "Summary of the Second Anniversary of the People's Liberation War and the Tasks of the Third Year," in which it pointed out: The PLA destroyed more than 1.52 million enemy troops in the second year of operations, of which 953,000 were taken prisoner.
On November 14, Mao Zedong wrote in an editorial for the Xinhua News Agency: "In the two years of war, about 3.09 million people were annihilated, captured and fled (including 2.64 million were annihilated and captured). ”
This figure includes the number of captured enemies in the Liaoshen campaign.
At the end of the Huaihai Campaign in January 1949, more than 555,000 enemies were annihilated, including nearly 300,000 prisoners. On January 31, Beiping was peacefully liberated, and the Pingjin Battle annihilated and reorganized more than 520,000 Jiang troops, and only 50,000 defenders escaped.
According to statistics, in the War of Liberation, Chiang Kai-shek's total strength reached 8 million, of which 4.5 million were captured by the People's Liberation Army, accounting for more than half of Chiang Kai-shek's total strength, and more than 3 million were reorganized and "melted" into the People's Liberation Army.
Such achievements and figures can only be achieved by the heroic and invincible People's Liberation Army under the leadership of the great military commander Mao Zedong, and almost no one in the world can reach such a number of captured enemies. No wonder even Stalin, who commanded the Soviet Red Army in World War II to win Stalingrad, the defense of Moscow, and the capture of Berlin, did not believe it!
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