In the summer of 1947, the 110th Division of the 85th Army of the Kuomintang Army was ordered to enter the Dabie Mountains to pursue Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping's troops of the People's Liberation Army of Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, and Henan from North China. The predecessor of this division was the 2nd Division of Feng Yuxiang's Northwest Army, and it was one of the main forces of the Chahar Anti-Japanese Allied Army. After the defeat of the Anti-Japanese Allied Army, the division was incorporated by Chiang Kai-shek into the 46th Independent Brigade, and after the outbreak of the All-out War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the 46th Independent Brigade was merged with the cavalry brigade of the Northeast Army and the troops of the Northern Henan Division to form the 110th Division.
The Northwest Army units were annexed by Townenburg
The 110th Division was then transferred to the 31st Group Army during its training in Xiaoyi Town, Gong County, Henan Province. Soon, he sent his confidant Wu Shaozhou to the division as deputy division commander, and soon he was promoted to division commander, replacing Zhang Zhen, the former commander of the Northern Henan Division, and withdrew and transferred many progressive officers of the division, and sent people to replace them with his basic unit, the 13th Army, but many people remained.
Among them is Liao Yunzhou, an underground member of the Communist Party of China, who secretly joined the party as early as 1927 when he was studying in the fifth phase of the Whampoa Military Academy, and has been hiding for a long time to engage in military movement work. When the 110th Division was formed, he was already the commander of the 656th Regiment of the division. By 1942, Wu Shaozhou was promoted to commander of the 85th Army, and Liao Yunzhou was also promoted to division commander because of his merits.
During the "encirclement and suppression" of Dabie Mountain, the rich were robbed and the poor were helped
However, after all, the 85th Army is a subordinate unit of the Central Army, and the 110th Division has long been within its establishment, and it has not dared to carry out extensive propaganda and rectification activities among the officers and men at the grassroots level, and it has inevitably been tainted with some bad habits of the army. After the troops marched into the Dabie Mountains, it coincided with the rainy season, the transportation was not smooth, the food supply was not available, the officers and men lacked food and clothing, and the behavior of forcibly buying and selling continued to occur. Although Commander Liao Yunzhou made every effort to suppress and resolutely put an end to the occurrence of bad incidents such as beating and injuring people, due to the increasing shortage of food, he could only eat wherever he went.
However, every time he ate the grain of the common people and used the things of the common people, Master Liao would keep an account so that he could find an opportunity to compensate him in the future; however, when he encountered the local tyrants and inferior gentry in the villages and towns, he did not need to be so polite, and sometimes he simply plundered the troops, whether it was gold or silver, or firewood, rice, oil and salt, all of them were emptied. This act of robbing the rich and helping the poor was naturally hated by the local landlords and gentry, who not only complained to Bai Chongxi, commander-in-chief of the "suppression of the general army" in Central China, but also wrote a letter to Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing, claiming that "the 110th Division is arsoning the army and destroying the people, and there must be a Communist Party inside, deliberately ruining the reputation of the Nationalist army." ”
Nanjing sent a "people's service team"
In addition to bitterly scolding army commander Wu Shaozhou for not strictly administering the army, they also sent a "people's service team" to the 110th Division to rectify military discipline. Although the "People's Service Corps" has a high-sounding name, it is actually a spy force. In the autumn of 1946, under the planning of Chen Cheng, chief of the General Staff of the Ministry of National Staff, the graduates of the press training classes of the Ministry of National Defense in various localities were unified and reorganized into the "People's Service Corps of the Ministry of National Defense," which were stationed in the strategic areas of the various departments and the units under the Pacification Command, which were directly under the command of the Ministry of National Defense and monitored the armies, divisions, and brigades of the Kuomintang Army at all times.
These people were all from the "Imperial Forest Army" built by Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo - the Youth Army, and after selection and training, their thinking became more stubborn and reactionary, and they had just entered the headquarters of the 110th Division, and they arrested a company commander and shot a squad leader because someone played mahjong. The arrival of the "people's service team" sounded the alarm for Liao Yunzhou, who quickly realized his negligence in his previous work and quickly straightened out military discipline to avoid being caught. At the same time, he secretly encouraged his subordinates to confront each other, did not provide the "people's service team" with a place to live, and did not allow them to enter and leave the barracks at will, so as to prevent them from playing a sabotage role.
The arrival of the "People's Service Team" also made Liao Yunzhou realize that the Kuomintang top brass had never given up monitoring him, and he acted more cautiously and cautiously, and remained dormant until the end of 1948 during the Huaihai Campaign. Because he had been well hidden, Division Commander Liao Yunzhou was not only not exposed, but when he and Huang Wei's 12th Corps had been besieged in Shuangduiji, he was also selected to serve as the vanguard of the Corps and lead the breakthrough; Division Commander Liao took the opportunity to lead his subordinates to revolt, not only successfully thwarting the Huang Wei Corps' breakthrough action, but also taking the opportunity to enter the liberated area and return to the people's camp.