In the month of the founding of New China, the officers and men of the Third Field Army came to the southeast coast, and the elite soldiers among them were about to land in Kinmen.
In the decades since, there has been a steady stream of reflection and review of the Battle of Kinmen, but there are also uncontrollable surprises that seem to be quietly changing history.
Nine thousand athletes went to Kinmen
From the second half of 1949 to the outbreak of the Korean War in June of the following year, many major events occurred in China.
It seems that the greatest impact on society is the large-scale escape, among these people are the members of the old regime of the national army, there are landlords and wealthy businessmen, and there are traitors who have groveled to the Japanese invaders in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression but have not been discovered, etc., in short, those who are afraid of being "cleared of old accounts" are trying their best to run towards Taiwan Island.
The Kuomintang could no longer afford to toss around on the mainland, and they focused their last efforts on escaping.
Almost 50 warships make 50 voyages a day, and the boarding points at the various estuaries are crowded with people, and they will also take a large number of families with them when they escape, which further exacerbates the congestion.
The island was originally home to more than 6 million people, but in the last two years before the collapse of the Kuomintang, the population increased by 2 million at one point, and the land burden became the biggest problem.
Since most of the people came to the island in chaos, the housing prices on Taiwan Island ushered in a skyrocket, and even the people in the Kuomintang organs and the army, as long as they did not have much power, were all crowded into beehive-like houses, and together they constituted the epitome of Chiang Kai-shek's loss of power.
On the other side of the strait, it's a different scene entirely.
After three major battles, the main force of the Kuomintang was burned, and the People's Liberation Army waved all the way south, liberating Nanjing and Shanghai one after another.
In July, after the People's Liberation Army entered Fujian, Chairman Mao ordered eight military units in Sanye to fight in Taiwan.
Only one month later, Fuzhou was liberated, and two months later, Zhangzhou, Xiamen, and the coastal islands were liberated one after another, and the situation was very good.
So far, Kinmen has become an isolated island, and the geographical location here is indeed a bit special, it is the bridgehead of Taiwan Island, and Zheng Chenggong's recovery of Taiwan in ancient history also started from Kinmen.
From a strategic point of view, if Kinmen is still in the hands of the Kuomintang, it will be very harmful, and they can blockade the inland and retreat to shield Taiwan Island.
Our army has already selected candidates, and on the battlefield, we pay attention to knowing ourselves and knowing our opponents, and the Kuomintang army's arrangement is also within the scope of consideration.
At that time, the defenders of Kinmen were the 22nd Corps under the command of Li Liangrong, which had an ugly record and had been defeated in the Huaihai Campaign, with backward equipment and unorganized troops, with only 20,000 nominal troops.
In contrast, the 10th Corps of the Third Field Army of the People's Liberation Army made great achievements, and its commander Ye Feiren called "Xiao Ye Ting" and was known for being good at fighting.
Before the battle, Ye Fei also feasted local leaders in the Tiger Cave, and during the banquet, he took out the momentum of victory and pointed to the dishes on the plate and said: "Jinmen is the meat on this plate, you can clip it whenever you want, and you can't run away." ”
On October 24, a weak northeast wind blew on the sea surface of Kinmen, and suddenly the roar of artillery pierced the silence of the night, which was more than 9,000 people in the first echelon of the 10th Corps landing on the island.
The commander of the 19th Kuomintang Corps also recalled in his diary: "In the dark of night, with their weapons, they jumped off the boat and swam into the water, scrambling to attack the shore. ”
However, Liu Yaya of the People's Liberation Army was a little puzzled, and for some reason, the soldiers set up an extremely strange formation when they crossed the sea.
In fact, Xiao Feng, deputy commander of the 28th Army at that time, also believed that the battle would be won, and that there would be capture after the victory, so the ship was also loaded with yuan, fat pigs, desks and chairs and other things, and the soldiers were waiting to open immediately after the victory.
The troops of the three regiments landed, but there was not even a division commander on board, and many soldiers had never seen the sea, and they were still sighing "why is the sea so salty?"
However, for both sides, there is no other way to fight on an isolated island than to fight to the death, and both sides have to fight desperately, otherwise they will not find a way out.
The cannon that sounded was the weapon in the hands of the Kuomintang, and compared to the People's Liberation Army that arrived in Kinmen by boat, the Kuomintang army had obviously already arranged artillery fire.
Moreover, Ye Fei and Xiao Feng did not find out in advance, after Li Liangrong was stationed in Kinmen, he went to find more than 7,000 people from Sun Liren's 201st Division and 601st and 602nd regiments to come and cooperate, and the number of defenders in Kinmen far exceeded the number of people who landed on the island.
Under the shelling, more than 9,000 PLA officers and men fell into chaos, but everyone still maintained the momentum of rushing to the death, which surprised the Kuomintang defenders.
Even though the national army has many advantages such as weapons, geographical location, and numbers, the PLA officers and soldiers still quickly broke through the defenders' positions and continued to achieve victories, and Liu Tianxiang, the commander of the 251st Regiment, also quickly made a report: The landing was successful, and more than 1,000 people were captured, and they were not easy to take care of.
After the hand-to-hand combat, the voice of the Kuomintang defenders' radio station also came and went: The communist army was fighting with us with bayonets, and they could no longer withstand it.
Originally, the situation was very good, but then there was a big reversal, in fact, the hidden danger of the tragedy was buried from the beginning of landing on the island.
In order to reduce casualties, the boats that landed on the island drove the beach for a long time, and some of the boats were directly inserted into the beach, but in the course of the battle, due to the low tide, all the ships ran aground, cutting off the retreat route.
After a night of fierce fighting, the PLA fought very fiercely, but in the morning, the situation changed.
As soon as the light was set, the Kuomintang sent medium-sized bombers to repeatedly strafe the stranded ships, and Li Yuxi, the "commander" of the Kuomintang navy, personally led the "Taiping" ships of the Second Fleet to rush over and bombard the ships of the troops landing on the island.
All the ships crossing the sea were destroyed, so that the soldiers of the second echelon could not keep up, so that the more than 9,000 officers and soldiers who landed on the island first had to face more than 40,000 Kuomintang defenders.
The rear troops could not pass, and the front troops could not return, which directly made the battle situation lose suspense, and the bloody battle lasted until the afternoon of October 28, when the PLA landed on the island and lost all the officers and men, and the Kuomintang boasted about this long-lost victory, and some newspapers even reported that "a modern version of the Battle of Chibi was fought."
The study of the Battle of Kinmen is not only because the battle itself was extremely tragic, but also because this battle reflected the problems that the PLA needs to solve from the land to the sea, and if we can learn a lesson, then the blood of more than 9,000 heroes has not been shed in vain.
Of course, there were some uncertainties on Kinmen Island at that time, which also affected the situation of the war.
"Golden Gate Bear"
After the Battle of Kinmen, the Kuomintang began to purchase tanks on a large scale, and this situation continued to the later Taiwanese army, which was inseparable from the unexpected situation that occurred in the battle.
Chiang Kai-shek, a native of Zhejiang, was well aware of the hydrological situation in the East China Sea, and in the second half of 1949, he anticipated that the People's Liberation Army might attack Kinmen, so he discussed countermeasures with Tang Enbo and Li Liangrong, and also launched an island-wide military exercise.
The exercise ended on the evening of the 24th, and when most of the exercise equipment was withdrawn, an American tank was stunned.
The M5A tank was also involved in the exercise, but it ran aground on its tracks while walking on a little red beach, and the Kuomintang soldiers who participated in the exercise at that time did not carry maintenance equipment, so they left two other tanks to assist in maintenance.
With a width of 5,000 meters and a depth of 600 meters, Red Beach is the perfect location for landing in Kinmen.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) knows this, and the Kuomintang also knows it, so the Kuomintang has always regarded this area as a key prevention area, but they never thought that the PLA would land in actual combat just after the exercise ended.
In the middle of the night, the tracks of the tank had not yet been repaired, and the fighters of the 244 regiment of the PLA went ashore here.
When the Kuomintang soldiers in the tank found out about the situation, they immediately opened fire on the shore, causing heavy casualties to the 244th Regiment, which had not yet gained a foothold.
Before the landing, the PLA fighters also took into account the presence of tanks, but in the process of crossing the sea, the rocket launchers and ammunition were carried separately by different fighters, and they could not find each other because it was too dark at night after landing, so they could only look for cover under shelling.
Each regiment had only one walkie-talkie, and whether the person in possession of the walkie-talkie was in the same boat as the regimental commander was also lost contact between the regiments, some of the ships deviated from the intended landing site, and some boats floated in the sea for five hours before they successfully landed.
After the battle, the stranded M5A tank was placed in the Kuomintang exhibition hall and named "Bear of Kinmen", which stated that this tank first detected the PLA landing and opened fire first.
Some Kuomintang military officials also said: "If the tank had not run aground there at that time, and the rest of the tanks had not cooperated with the maintenance, the outcome of the battle might have been rewritten." ”
Later, the Kuomintang army always regarded the tanks on the seaside as a sharp weapon that could counter the landing, and believed that the light infantry of the PLA after the landing was no match for the tanks at all.
The more than 9,000 soldiers became passive under a series of mistakes, but they still fought fiercely on the island for three days and three nights, and finally ran out of ammunition and food, except for a small part of which were captured and captured by the Kuomintang, most of the rest died heroically.
In addition, there is an extremely alarming factor, which was buried in 1948.
In the Huaihai Campaign, Hu Lian gave Huang Wei as the deputy commander, and the situation of their meeting was completely passive, more than 100,000 people from the four armies of the Corps were surrounded and annihilated, Hu Lian and Huang Wei fled separately in two tanks, Huang Wei's tank capsized in the ditch and was captured, but the cunning Hu Lian chose to go retrograde.
At that time, the People's Liberation Army saw this tank, and they only thought that the tank was traveling on a strange route, but most people didn't think much about it because it thought that the tank had been captured, otherwise why did it dare to drive directly in the direction full of PLA attacks?
Moreover, Hu Lian in the tank was covered in blood due to the damage caused by the grenade, and after he escaped, he was sent to Shanghai Hongkou Catholic Hospital for rescue, and 32 pieces of shrapnel were removed from his back, one of which was very close to the heart.
Later, after Hu Lian gradually woke up, Chiang Kai-shek immediately gave him a task: when he got better, he would go to work, and go to Zhejiang, Fujian, and Jiangxi provinces to recruit troops and horses to escort the retreat of the Nationalist Government.
Unexpectedly, with his three-inch incorruptible tongue pit abduction, Hu Lian really recruited a large number of people to drive to Taiwan Island.
After Hu Lian arrived on Taiwan Island, he was also arranged to arrange the defense of Kinmen, and he hid his combat whereabouts very deeply, so that the PLA did not find any traces of his corps after liberating Xiamen, thinking that he was bluffing, and on the day of the Kinmen Campaign on October 24, the PLA intercepted a telegram, which showed that Hu Lian requested that the 12th Corps at sea be withdrawn to Taiwan Island.
In fact, this is another smoke bomb released by Hu Lian, an old fox.
At that time, the PLA command really thought that Hu Lian had not landed, and Ye Fei also thought that he could take advantage of Hu Lian's army not landing to launch an attack first, but he did not expect to fall into a trap.
General Liu Yaya, recalling the Battle of Kinmen, said: "It is not so much that the Battle of Kinmen was lost to Chiang Kai-shek as it was to the sea. ”
Chiang Ching-kuo's diary also recorded the tragic situation he saw after going to Kinmen: when he arrived at the front line, he saw corpses everywhere, and his flesh and blood were blurred.
And the news he brought back was like a shot in the arm for Chiang Kai-shek, and as a result, the idea of "recovering the mainland" in his heart became stronger and stronger.
After the war, Hu Lian twice served as the commander-in-chief of the defense of Kinmen, and he built military fortifications on this island, which originally had a population of only a few thousand, and even built a "National Revolutionary Army Cemetery" to bury those Kuomintang soldiers who died on Kinmen Island.
Although the battle was not huge in scale, it took place at an extremely critical historical moment and had a decisive impact on the entire situation.
At that time, the Kuomintang government led by Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt and fled and retreated all the way to Taiwan, which was not yet fully secured, and if the PLA could successfully take Kinmen Island, it would be possible to liberate Taiwan in one fell swoop.
However, history always changes from different angles, with the strong attack of the US military in Korea, the central government must give priority to the northeast, many PLA soldiers waiting for the glorious moment in the south have stepped on the train to the north, and they will fight to the death with the US army, which is known as the "strongest on the surface", on the Korean Peninsula.
As for Kinmen, Su Yu later wrote a long letter to Chairman Mao, in which he expressed his overall thoughts on the operation on the islands off the southeast coast, including the idea of building a navy and air force as soon as possible.
Resources
"The Chronicle of the Battle of Kinmen" on Wu Junyao's voice
Behind the Battle of Kinmen, Hu Ping was in the same boat